To The Honour of the Mother
by Dame Niamh
Summary: COMPLETE! Severus Snape's long journey out of the darkness, with some help from a couple of Druids, magic of diverse kinds, agonising self-knowledge and a very special champion. You're invited to the wedding! Please R and R
1. Default Chapter

To The Honour of the Mother  
  
Chapter 1: The Green Lady  
  
Susan Dowd: Had I not seen it with me own eyes, I would not have believed it.  
  
It was the first day of the beginning of the term after summer holiday. The luncheon hour was almost over, and only a few lingered at the long tables: students discussing lessons or giggling over gossip. One master sat alone, at the very end of the master's table, with his nose in a text, picking now and then at his food with one hand while he made notes in a book with the other.  
  
Samuel and I had checked the condition of the tables; not much to do, as the serving elves clear them after a meal, when in comes a lady dressed all in green. The new Runes Mistress, I supposed, too late for luncheon. I hastened over to her.  
  
"Welcome, madam," I said. "I am Susan Dowd. My husband Samuel and I are in charge of the kitchen elves. Have ye eaten, and how shall we name ye?"  
  
She was neither too tall nor too short, slender, with an oval face, and a fine Gaelic map to that face. For the rest of her, she wore her green gown and cloak to her ankles, and a thin green gold coronet holding her wimple and veil to her head in the old style.  
  
"Good day," she said in a musical voice. "I have not eaten. I take only a little soup at midday, with some bread and fruit. Ye may call me what ye will as long as it is kindly. Some call me Angharad." It is an old Irish name I had not heard in many a year.  
  
"Soup, bread and fruit it is, Dame Angharad, " I said, conducting her to a seat. I bespoke Samuel, who came bustling out of the kitchen, beaming, bearing a tray with a bowl of hot lentil soup, a small loaf of dark bread with a wee crock of fresh butter, a goblet of water, and a dish of cut fruits. He knelt before the lady, his face glowing. "Welcome, druid mistress, Green Lady," he said. The lady smiled and laid her palm on his forehead. "Blessed be," she pronounced, "and thanks for food and drink." She bowed her head and uttered a prayer, and then she began to eat, praising the food, and she beckoned me to sit with her. "Who is that at the far end of the table?" she asked, pointing towards the lone master with her little finger. "That's Master Snape, the potions master. He is a solitary man, and prefers to eat alone and not at luncheon, which is the noisiest meal of all," I told her.  
  
Her brows knit and she studied him for a long moment. He must have felt her gaze, for he looked up briefly, then returned to his study.  
  
"The man's too t'in," she said. (Trust an Irishwoman to see what's to be seen straightaway).  
  
"Aye, thin he is," I agreed, "and ill-tempered, and sharp-tongued, and an expression to him like his britches are too tight in the arse. A nasty piece of work, he is."  
  
The lady considered, biting off a piece of the crisp bread-crust with small sharp white teeth. "Say you, this is a teacher? How shall the children learn from him if he is wretched?"  
  
"The children are afraid of him, but they learn their potions, they do. I don't know where Master Dumbledore found him, but there is not his like for potions in any of the worlds, they say."  
  
"Have ye been given a House, Lady?" Samuel asked. He had hovered near to see if she should need anything.  
  
"I have not," she said. "I shall go where they put me." The lady finished her soup, passed her hand over her bowl and it bloomed with fresh, fragrant thyme. She put the crumbs of her bread on the floor beneath the table for any creature that should be hungry. She smiled, and her green eyes crinkled at the corners. "Thanks to the cook for the good food, and to you for the kind welcome," she said. She looked towards the end of the room, where Master Snape crouched at the end of the table like a black spider crouched over a fly. I have oft wondered what he would look like if he were not as sour as spoilt milk, with that greasy black hair falling over his blazing eyes.  
  
The Green Lady rose. "Sometimes folk don't know what they need, though they sicken for needing of it," she said. She laid her palm on my forehead, and I smelt fresh herbs and new-cut grass. "Blessed be," she said. She walked with measured tread towards the end of the room, and behind Master Snape, who took no notice of her passage. A wave of her hand, and a small dish appeared next to his right hand. Without thinking, he took the spoon and fed himself some of what was in that dish. He seemed not to know what he did, but ate steadily as he worked.  
  
When next I looked up, Master Snape had gone. He had left bread-crumbs beneath the table, and a small brown mouse was eating them. That was the first ever of generosity I saw from himself. *** 


	2. Chapter 2: Dream or Reality?

To The Honour of the Mother  
  
Chapter 2: Dream or Reality?  
  
Severus Snape dismissed his last class of the day, stacked up his books with a thump, tucked them under his arm and strode out of the classroom, his black cloak swirling behind him. The afternoon had been interminably long, and he was glad it was over, eager to get to his laboratory to find out what in the nine Hells was wrong with him.  
  
All afternoon he had smelt fresh-cut grass. It was not a smell one found in Hogwarts; the grass never wanted cutting, as it always grew to exactly the proper height. His gaze had wandered out of the large windows as he paced in front of the class or stood at a laboratory bench. Never before had he been distracted, and it had taken all of his strength not to give in to it. Dusk was falling; he could get in a few hours before dinner.  
  
Three hours later, he had found nothing. He tested his blood, urine and saliva; no poisons or foreign substances. He passed an Arabian changeling stone over his liver; nothing. He examined the undersides of his eyelids and his fingernails, looked long and searchingly at his tongue; nothing. He meditated on the odd symptoms he had experienced - nothing. Neither was there any evidence that he had been bespelled. As he prepared to leave the laboratory, he realised that he was hungry. He was famished.  
  
All masters were expected to sit at the Masters' Table at dinner; his high- backed chair was set four down from Headmaster Dumbledore, in the middle of the table, and he was expected to stand behind it, watching as his House filed in and until all had seated themselves.  
  
It was not Snape's way to make conversation at dinner. If someone asked him a question he answered it; otherwise he sat still as a stone, a beady eye scanning the Slytherins at their dining table, eating sparsely and slowly, and listening to the talk around him. Tonight was the same, except that he could hardly wait for Dumbledore to intone the blessing, and for the food to materialise on the tables. Snape helped himself to a slice of roast beef, some of the browned potatoes, and a piece of bread, his usual dinner. Slowly he cut a piece of the meat and put it in his mouth. It tasted so good that his jaws ached, an unfamiliar sensation so odd that he took another piece of meat to see if it happened again. It did not, but when he took some of the potato, it did happen, and he had to clap his napkin to his face to keep the savoury pan gravy from running down his chin.  
  
The meal was an odd experience, when all was said and done, for he found little pleasure in life and never in victuals. He ate more than he usually did; he ate of the colourful vegetable stew; he ate a serving of light, fluffy Yorkshire pudding; he ate a bowl of green salad, which disturbed him most of all. He never ate salads. He drank a cup of tea, which seemed to need the addition of milk and honey, things he never used, to end his meal, and exited the dining-hall as soon as he was able without causing comment. It was not until he was halfway up the first staircase that he realised he had come away with a chocolate petit pain in his hand. Disgusted with himself, he thought of dematerialising it, but he ate it anyway.  
  
It told much about Master Snape that the students of Slytherin house paid him little attention. No-one whispered, "Look! Snape's tucking it in tonight!" Professor McGonagall, who was sensitive to every change, was deep in conversation with a woman in green whom he did not know, and didn't even look his way. Relieved, Snape followed his charges back to their rooms, made sure everyone was addressing homework, and betook himself to his chambers in the dungeon, where he read for hours, trying to understand why he kept smelling fresh grass, why he who was disinterested in victuals had suddenly developed an appetite; why his concentration was faltering. And that last was of the most concern.  
  
Finally he gave up. A pass of his hand filled his bathtub with steaming water. He had thrown a handful of lavender and sandalwood powder into the water before he realised what he had done. The scent filled his head. Puzzled, he removed his garments carefully, as always. His boots stepped over to their place by the wardrobe. His cloak, trousers, jacket and shirt flew onto their hangers, as always. His undergarments sailed onto their shelves, folding themselves neatly, dispelling every molecule of dirt or dust. Indeed, as always. Snape folded his long body into the tub, sighing as his muscles loosened in the hot water. He drowsed there for a few minutes before he sat up with a start, scrubbed, rinsed and got out of the tub on legs that were unaccustomedly rubbery. Bloody Hell, he thought, appalled that he should even think a Muggle oath. Keep eating as he had today, he grumped, and he would soon be too fat for his clothes.  
  
In her Ravenclaw chamber, Dame Angharad observed the man. She had watched him eat a proper dinner, probably his first in his life, and she had seen him in his bath. She saw him now, standing at the foot of his bed with his scratchy grey nightshirt in his hands, and a smile touched the corners of her mouth as he frowned over the garment, considered getting into bed without it and, shocked at himself, put it on and pulled it down firmly to his ankles.  
  
Dame Angharad had seen a good deal of what Snape had just covered. He was thin, but not skinny. He had large, long bones, and his chest was smooth, with only a bit of black hair in the centre. His legs were fine, with the same silky black hair on them, and by the Mother, he was a lusty figure of a man, with all that a man should have to himself. It were a sin to let such go to waste.  
  
Dame Angharad lay down in her bed. Her rose-red hair, freed from coif and wimple, flowed over the linen pillow. She let her spirit rise lightly, and it flew from her chamber to that of Master Snape, where he believed he was dreaming. For how, in the names of the seventeen worlds, could Master Snape countenance the mystical encounter he would experience?  
  
He found himself deep in the woods, in a copse made by the circling of great, aged oak trees around a mound of earth overgrown with ivy. In the centre of the mound was a dolmen, an ancient upright stone pierced with a hole, and at the foot of the dolmen was a rectangular stone, like a small table. It was strewn with herbs; he could smell rosemary, thyme and vervain. It was full dark, but the dolmen shone with a cool green light. He lay down on the flat stone, and looked up to see shapes circling the mound, figures wrapped in green garments. He heard chanting; he smelt incense of sandalwood. Little glowing morsels of light flitted about like insects. Music came; the haunting sound of the Uillean pipes. A cool breeze blew, lifting his garment, which flew away with the little lights. He lay naked and unafraid; it was peaceful and pleasant, and hazy thoughts came and went, came and left.  
  
Hands rested on his shoulders. He closed his eyes; the hands were soft and cool and gentle. Hands held his hands. Hands stroked down his chest. Hands parted his legs and he opened his eyes: A green-clad figure stood with a sharp knife in hand, as hands enclosed his manhood, and the knife was raised for the sacrifice.  
  
Snape sat bolt upright in his bed, streaming sweat, freezing cold. His heart pounded, and he was nauseous. All that food, it's given me nightmares, he thought. Well, it was only a dream. But his nightshirt was gone. And a strand of ivy twined its velvety stem around his loins. With revulsion he pulled it away; it clung, then reluctantly let go. He threw it on his cold hearth; it crumbled into ashes. He flung out a counterspell against any and all spells, but it fell leaden to the floor: there was nothing to negate. Sleep gone, he dressed (finding his nightshirt on its usual hook in the wardrobe) and stalked out into the halls. He walked along a colonnade open to the air; it was a beautiful night. The moon shone down on the peaceful countryside. He heard a step, and turned. The woman in green, to whom McGonagall had been talking at dinner, walked towards him.  
  
"Good evening, master," she said. "We have not met. I am Angharad, Runes Mistress, come this day to Hogwarts." Snape drew himself up, and bowed. "Welcome, madam," he said. "Severus Snape, potions master. I advise you to return to your quarters; since you do not know your way about and might become lost. I shall summon a torch to lead you. Fulgens," he said, and a large torch materialised in mid-air, circled and then slowly drifted towards the moving staircases. It stopped and waited for the lady to follow. The lady smiled. "I shall go presently," said she, " but I see that you are troubled by that which not even the Potions Master can rout." His brows beetled. "That, madam, is my own business," he said, and turned to walk away. The feather-light touch of her hand on his arm stopped him in his tracks. "I see a rune you cannot see," she said mildly. He stopped and turned, his cloak swirling about him as if it had a life of its own. "Nor do I wish to see it!" he thundered, turned on his heel and strode down the steps as quickly as he could.  
  
The door of his rooms closed quietly and solidly behind him. For a few moments Snape stood still, trembling with rage. There was something about the woman that frightened him, and the fear outraged him. He shook himself out of his cloak, which flew onto its hanger.  
  
He sat down at his desk and commanded his radio to play. Dvorák's Slavonic Dances filled the air, and he threw back his head, closed his eyes and lost himself in the swooningly romantic music. The piece ended, to be followed by Scheherezade, and he was transported to exotic climes, the lands of genii and phoenix, and so he finally slept slumped over his desk, carried on the wings of melody, until a shaft of light shot through the narrow window in his dungeon wall, and he woke suddenly with an aching back, a stiff neck and a stomach grumbling for breakfast. *** 


	3. Chapter 3: You Don't Bring Me Flowers

To The Honour of the Mother  
Chapter Three: You Don't Bring Me Flowers  
  
After breakfast, which included porridge, eggs and kippers, toast, muffins and jam and three cups of coffee with cream and sugar, Snape betook himself to a Quidditch match, or intended to. On his way to the stadium, he was distracted by a hedge of blooming wild roses, and fell into the matchless beauty of the blossoms as he witnessed their growth from single pollen cell to bud to bloom and seed. Finding the game over by the time he reached the stadium, he returned to the castle, and visited Madam Pomfrey's domain, inquiring after one of the students who was injured by an exploding cauldron. He looked into the boy's wound and saw the astonishing healing taking place therein.  
  
Something had definitely happened to him. He decided not to eat luncheon; fearing that he may somehow have been poisoned. He was discomfited by his hunger (after such a breakfast), and instead of going to the dining hall, he walked out into the Forbidden Forest in search of toadstools or his potions. He found a large ring of toadstools around a hummock of moss as soft and thick as green velvet. He sat down on it just for a moment, and was instantly asleep. His dream began as before in the ivy copse, but this time he was not the sacrificial victim. He knelt on the flat stone by the dolmen and offered up a bouquet of toadstools in homage to the Mother, but they turned to worms in his hands.  
  
He found himself drawn back in time to his sad childhood, and he wept, his stomach tied in knots with hunger, his joints aching from cold and his back from a beating he did not know he had been given. Face down on the moss, he trembled with fear and anger together. All was dark. A soft, warm mantle covered him, and an arm under his shoulders turned him over and lifted him to a half sitting position. He was held against a very female body, a gentle hand stroked his hair away from his face. He buried his face in the hollow of neck and shoulder, and then to the soft globe of a breast. The nipple touched his lips, and his hunger was sated, his cold warmed. He slept against the motherly bosom.  
  
He wakened standing on the steps of the Great Hall; his hands filled with toadstools, and almost fell to the floor. Unfortunately, Harry Potter, late for luncheon, in the process of tearing into the Hall, bumped into the Potions Master, sending both onto the floor in a welter of toadstools, which promptly turned into worms and crawled away. The Runes Mistress, Dame Angharad, was standing beside him when he regained his feet, brushed off his cloak and tried to gain a semblance of dignity.  
  
"Ye have been given a sign; the Mother lifted ye and nourished ye and comforted ye when ye were in need, and that after ye offered her naught but toadstools. She gave ye to see how the rose grows by her mercy; ye saw a wound knit, again by the mercy of the Mother, and still ye will not understand?" Dame Angharad's voice was soft, but her tone was severe. Snape backed away from her in fury.  
  
"And was it the Mother," he bellowed, striding up and down and striking his fists together, "whose pleasure it would have been to castrate me in the wood?"  
  
To his disgust, the Green Lady laughed, a soft chiming like that of foxglove bells. He opened his mouth to speak, and her small hand covered it, gently, gently. He was immobile. She took his hand and led him to a settee against the wall, and pushed him lightly onto it. He sat. "Ye are the Mother's son and brother and husband," she said. "She would never hurt ye, even if ye hurt her. She meant to cut the spirit ivy twining round your loins, to free your male strength so that ye could worship her properly."  
  
Her palm rested on his brow briefly, and he could move again. She sat next to him, knee to knee, and he was no longer afraid. "What do you-I don't understand. How does one worship her?"  
  
The Green Lady smiled and nodded. "Not with offerings," she said. "One worships the Mother by accepting her gifts, as you did the rose and the wound; by respecting her, as ye do by caring for her trees and farms and waterways; by doing what she asks of ye to perpetuate the cycle of life, and, for ye, to love her daughters."  
  
Snape paled, his way of blushing. "I have no time for love," he muttered. "I'd be equally as willing for a dentist to be drilling than to ever let a woman in my life. *"  
  
* From "My Fair Lady," Lerner & Lowe, I Shall Never Let A Woman in My Life, performed by Rex Harrison as Prof. Henry Higgins. 


	4. Chapter 4: Himself Shall Learn a Lesson

To The Honour of the Mother  
Chapter Four: Himself Shall Learn A Lesson  
  
Dame Angharad took up the bobbin, twirling it slowly to take up the wool thread that spun from the woman's fingers. "Why do ye spin, ye who are a wizard and the daughter of wizards?"  
  
Brigit smiled. "My mother spun, and her mother before her. It is most soothing, releasing the mind to think of other things, like a meditation."  
  
Angharad felt the fine thread. "And so ye make something lovely withal," she commented. "When your mind is free, what do ye think of?" "I pray to the Mother, and sing songs to her, and I think of - other things as well." Her cheeks flushed rosy.  
  
"Do ye indeed?"  
  
"Aye. I think of what ye told me, of the Potions Master, all twined round with his ill humour, and a waste of the Mother's gifts, so wretched is he. I know what to do for the likes of him."  
  
"Indeed, ye do? What would ye do with him?" Dame Angharad smiled and twirled the bobbin.  
  
"I'd box his ears to teach him a lesson, "said Brigit, her blue eyes snapping. "I'd throw himself upon the bed and pull off his breeches with me teeth, and then I'd give him such a shagging his eyes would stay crossed for a week."  
  
Dame Angharad threw back her head and laughed and laughed. "'T'would do him a world of good," she said. "I think you should plan to do it straightaway. But mind you, before you set him into an eye-crossing stupor, take care he knows how to honour the Mother by pleasing her daughters."  
  
Brigit put a new cloud of unspun fleece on the heddle. "If he doesn't know, I'll teach him," she smiled. *** Professor Snape put a handful of toadstool slices on a tray lined with a sheet of parchment and slid the tray into the desiccator. A small lump of anthracite on the bottom glowed, at his bidding, providing the subtle heat that would dry the fungi to perfection, slowly and evenly.  
  
He looked into a simmering cauldron, regulated the heat thereunder, and moved around to an elaborate distilling apparatus. A retort filled with a yellow liquid bubbled over the small blue flame of a green candle; the vapours moved up and down an arrangement of glass tubing, through several filters and finally dripped, liquid again, clear blue drops into a waiting flask. He loved (although that was too strong a word) the economy and precision of potions preparation, the transmogrification of elements, the creation of substances and the refinement of certain properties in a substance.  
  
Satisfied that all was proceeding as he wished, he sat down at his desk to make his notations in his precise, crabbed handwriting. Thank whatever-it- was that he had had a decent day: no confrontations with obnoxious female druids, no seductive odours to distract him from his work; best of all, no nightmares last night. He had lived through several horrible days in which the ordered, secure world he inhabited had threatened to collapse on his head.  
  
There was a discreet knock on the door. "Enter," he said, not looking up.  
  
"Master, these orders are from Madam Pomfrey, she asked that I bring them straightaway."  
  
Snape looked up. The bringer of hospital orders was one of Madam Pomfrey's nurse aides, a thin, quiet woman he had been aware of but never actively noticed. He took the folder of scrips from her hand. "Wait over there," he ordered, indicating a small settee next to his cold hearth.  
  
The aide sat down and waited quietly, her hands folded in her lap. Only her bright blue eyes moved, watching the drops of liquid dripping from the distillery into the waiting flask. The corners of her mouth curved upward slightly. The man at the desk was an ugly git, indeed, made worse by the nasty bile-green aura surrounding him. Why did the Mother think he was worth the trouble it would surely take to make him into a proper devotee? Brigit sighed silently. The Mother must have something planned for him, and who was she to argue?  
  
Still, he was the least likely son of the Mother she had ever seen. Although, she reminded herself, Angharad thought he had possibilities. I shall have to See what I can see, she thought. With that, Dame Angharad bespoke her, and lo! She Saw the man; naked as the day he was born, standing at the foot of his bed with that hideous nightshift of his in his hands. Hmmm, thought Brigit. What good is all that if he has no generosity of it? 'Tis true that we shall be judged not by how we are loved but by how we love. There is no love in him. Angharad, we will have to start with his spirit.  
  
"You," said the Potions Master, looking up at Brigit. "Take this phial to Madam Pomfrey, for the one with convulsions, and tell her he must have it immediately, and she must not keep him too warm. He will survive. For the rest, tell her I shall have her scrips delivered first thing in the morning." He held out a small phial and an envelope.  
  
Brigit stood up and walked slowly over to the desk. She held out her hand for the phial and paper. The master frowned at her. "Are you a Weasley?" he asked.  
  
"I am not," she answered. "There's many with red hair and freckles that are not Weasleys, Master Snape. I am a McDiarmaidh, of the clan McDiarmaidh, chieftains and wizards since the time before time." Her blue eyes snapped at him, and she pushed a curl of carrot-red hair off her forehead. "Ye might look to your still, Master," she said. "It is going dry, and will spoil the potion."  
  
Snape pushed back his chair and hastened over to his distillery. She was right, he saw: although the retort still bubbled, something had stopped up one of the glass pipes, and the heat was building up. He tapped the stoppered pipe with his wand, and it cleared immediately. He turned to Brigit: "How do you come to know so much, you're only an aide in the hospital?" he demanded.  
  
Brigit smiled, that small, inscrutable smile that has maddened Irishmen for generations. "I know what I know," she answered demurely. Snape's brows beetled; she could sense an explosion coming. "Did ye not know that most druids are healers? We taught the likes of ye about potions, indeed." She lay her slender, oval hand on his forehead before he could move away. "Blessed be," she said, turned, and was gone. Snape leaned on the edge of his laboratory bench. He was breathless with fury. Another one! Damn these women! What did they want of him? His orderly mind reminded him that she had asked nothing.  
  
He sat down heavily in his chair. What, then, do I want of her? 


	5. Chapter 5: Step Ye Lively

Chapter 5 Step Ye Lively  
  
"Halloween's coming! It's coming!" There was no doubt that any student at Hogwarts had only to look at a calendar to know that Halloween was indeed coming, but three days before the great holiday, there was mounting excitement in the air, as if the celebration was a surprise.  
  
The closer one came to Halloween, the more the pranks proliferated, and the more outrageous they became. Most of the Masters suffered the fun gladly, and some might even be coaxed into league with the pranksters, as when McGonagall assisted the Gryffindors in providing the house ghosts with spectral motor cars of ancient and noisy vintage, and the corridors and halls resounded with the "Ah-OOGAH!" of klaxons, multiple backfires like the farting of elephants, and various Grands Prix run on the ceiling of the Great Hall.  
  
In the kitchens, Mrs Susan Dowd, her husband Samuel and their staff of culinary elves planned the feasts: the Halloween Eve banquet and the picnics to be enjoyed in the graveyards. This year, there was to be a masked ball, at the special request of Headmaster Dumbledore. After the past year's battles and victories, the good man believed that celebration was in order. Students began to work on masks and costumes, and the staff (well, almost all of it) was enthused. A guest list grew as wizards and witches from all the known worlds were invited, along with dignitaries who resided in the Ether and only visited Real Time on special occasions.  
  
Dame Angharad offered the talents of Cuchulain, a famous Celtic band that played everything from medieval dances to rock. Professor Sprout's nephew, Andrew, belonged to a swing band wherein he played a mean saxophone, and he agreed to have them perform. Although there were some mutterings about Muggle entertainment, in truth, music was one of the few arts that transcended such divisions.  
  
*** Snape took Madam Pomfrey's hand and brought her around in front of him to take Lockhart's hand, then he pivoted and passed right shoulders with Professor McGonagall, resplendent in an emerald green ball gown with an astonishing enormous skirt. Although he would later deny that he had done it, he scooped McGonagall up around the waist, and swung her high in the air, her petticoats flying, then set her down to twirl away, delighted, her thin cheeks bright red with excitement. Professor Sprout, passing left shoulders with him, tugged on his sleeve. "Swing me! Swing me, Severus!" she squealed. Snape took a big breath and got the plump lady a respectable twelve inches off the ground; she wobbled a bit on landing, but danced off, all a-flutter. Gilderoy Lockhart did dance rather well, he noted, although not with his grace and refinement; Lockhart tended to odd attitudes of his feet and stilted hand-motions.  
  
The Irish band began a dignified Gaillard, and the students made for the tables; it seemed that social dancing was a dying grace. They would rather shake like palsy and posture like automatons. The masters, it seemed, were the last bastions of culture in the wizarding world. Snape saw, approaching him with her hand out, his next partner. Ah, no, not she, not that blasted Runes Mistress. He drew himself up, looked down his nose and held out his fist. Dame Angharad placed her hand on it, and they moved off into the intricate figures of a dance that celebrated Samhain.  
  
She did not speak, but danced with lightness and elegance. She had changed her usual green gown, cloak, nunlike wimple and veil for an Irish court robe, bordered with spectacular ribbonwork, and a small hat that sat like a crown on her long, rose-red hair. On her breast was the rune of Mab, and her silver girdle held a leathern pouch in which she carried rune stones and a triskellion.  
  
Snape found himself transported inside the music, far from the Great Hall at Hogwarts. He and Dame Angharad danced in a circle of standing stones, pacing amongst the monoliths, circling the menhir. A rising sun struck the central dolmen and radiance shot from it, striking him momentarily blind. He cried out and almost fell; a small, strong hand supported him. Of a sudden, he was standing on the balcony that surrounded the Gryffindor tower. Another dream?  
  
His voice reached that high, peevish whine perfected by generations of upper class Englishmen, and most uncharacteristic of himself: "I don't want to be any different than I am, dammit; I am quite content, thank you, and my life is as I wish it to be, and I do not intend to change!"  
  
"Think of this then," said Dame Angharad. "For reasons beyond your ken, you suffered as a child, and so you made a small cell in which you might hide yourself from the many who hurt you. You made that cell strong, and it is a familiar place, your sanctuary into which none may enter. It is where you are safe-"  
  
Snape interrupted her, looming over her, his fists clenching and unclenching. "You have no knowledge of my life!" he shouted. "You have no idea! Nor do I wish you to! I have made my life to suit myself and none other, and that's the way I want to keep it. I don't need your well meaning platitudes, and I especially don't need your psychological analysis!" He stalked to the balcony railing, willing the cold breeze to push the blood from his cheeks, to quiet his breathing and restore his icy calm.  
  
There was silence behind him. He turned to see the Runes Mistress, walk slowly towards the door. She stopped and turned to him. In the torchlight he saw her wet cheeks. Oh, you rotten sod, you have made her cry, how could you. He caught himself up: "Now, I won't fall for your tricks, so you can save your tears."  
  
She stepped forward. "I will weep for you whether you will it or no. The Mother gave me a task, which was to help you to open yourself to the heaven on earth around you. That was all she asked; that you accept what She gives you. And that includes joy, which we offer to Her in gratitude. She never asked you to change: you are what you are. She only asked you to open your heart and let Her in. I've failed."  
  
She put her hand lightly on his arm, and her grief shot out and pierced him. She turned and left the balcony, and left him with an unaccustomed ache in the back of his throat. He seemed to hear the creak of hinges long rusted as a door long bolted shut opened a crack; the door that sealed a small, low-ceilinged cell, dark and dank and with one tiny high window, barred almost to the point of obscurity.  
  
He watched himself enter, and sit down on the stone bench, his elbow on his knee, his chin on his fist. The smell of wild roses came to him, sweet and fresh and heartbreaking. He knew how they grew. A child's wound healed; the armies of corpuscles battled invading organisms and a sparkling shower from nowhere knitted the sundered flesh together. His knees felt weak as he saw the open wound and felt the pain that had caused it when the hot, hard fragments of an exploding cauldron smote the child at almost one hundred kilometres an hour.  
  
Music played, his favourite Dvorak, and his heart moved to its rhythms. He knew that music is indeed the song of the spheres; he witnessed the heavenly dance and its accompanying cantata, and he was humbled. The notes resonated in every fibre of his being, and with an excruciating snap a crack appeared in the thick stone wall of his cell and at the same time, in the shell surrounding the spirit of Severus Snape. His spirit, exposed, shrank with fear. The music bathed his senses like balm, and he smelt balsam and vervain. The crack widened, and he shivered. On the other side there waited a warmth and light utterly alien to him.  
  
He did not know how he regained his feet; how he walked towards the crack in the cell's cold ugly stone, but there was gold and green light glowing outside, the scent of balsam and vervain, and warmth that drew him forward. His fear hammered on the inside of his skull: "Don't go there, you will be hurt!" He could not hurt any worse than he was hurting now. All of his pain, all of his anguish and sorrow, jealously guarded as if they were jewels of virtue instead of the stones of shame all these years, beat in his chest and eyes and hands: we have never deserted you; your pain has been faithful to you; do not let it go.  
  
Gasping for breath and blinded by alien light, he burst through the crevice, and his head pounded hideously, recalling his tortured birth. Consciousness fled down a long corridor, and the soft dark took him. 


	6. Chapter 6: Ye Shall Know What I Know

Chapter 6: Ye Shall Know What I Know  
  
Severus Snape wakened in his own chambers. His eyes felt as if sand had been poured in them; they were dry, gritty and terribly painful. He could barely see in the light of the one lone candle flickering on his bedside table. He sat up painfully; every joint in his body ached as if he had been beaten. His skin hurt as if sluiced with acid. He sat miserably on the edge of his bed; worse than the pain of the body was the void within him. It is a mean chamber into which I have avoided looking, he thought. Now I look within, and I see it is empty, void. His chest shuddered painfully, and the sobs he had repressed because voicing them would have brought even more punishment burst through his throat; his head drooped into his hands and he wept from the depths of his soul.  
  
He was a small boy, thin and pale and silent, running towards a promise of safety that turned into a toothed and fanged tormentor. He was a young fellow, withdrawn, introspective, with his many-times-broken nose pressed against the glass of the rest of life, watching the colour, the motion, the liveliness within as the sleet beat against his back. He was an accomplished student, burying himself in his studies, avoiding his fellows, avoiding their laughter, boisterousness and silly chatter, watching the woman he loved (though he dared not tell her so) give her hand and her heart to someone he had thought was his friend.  
  
He was a demon, a monster, a Death-Eater, vassal to the embodiment of evil, participant in the most heinous and abominable crimes, and celebrant in depraved and sadistic revels. He inflicted pain; he stole souls.  
  
Now, he was a schoolmaster, entrusted with children's lives, passing on his talent for chemistry and magic to the next generation of wizards. Entrusted with children! His way was harsh, his method was to hone and temper those worthy of his interest by passing them through fire and Detention. His coin was terror, not encouragement. Those who succeeded did it in spite of him, not because of him.  
  
And where was he in all of this? He was jailed in his cold, ugly cell like a snail in its portable house. It was his armour. There was no love in him, or for him. He recalled the dream in which the Mother lifted him and nourished him, comforting him in her warmth. The pain was unbearable.  
  
"What am I to do?" he whispered. He knew of no anodyne for this agony; now that he had confronted his misery, his fear and his loneliness, was he to be forever in its thrall? Better had he never looked within. Perhaps if he slept - but then, those dreams.he lay down, weary beyond words.  
  
His door swung open, its lock dripping green fire. Snape closed his eyes. "Go away," he said. There was no answer. He heard a "whoosh!" as a fire kindled in his hearth; a moment later the warm air reached him. He heard a click as his window swung open. The sweet odour of night blooming cereus drifted in, on a white shaft of moonlight. He turned away, burying his face in his pillow. The edge of the bed moved as someone sat down on it, and he rose up on his arms to confront the intruder.  
  
"'Tis only meself," said Brigit. "Lie down again, now." Women. Druids. She read his mind: "What do ye want with me? Ye do not know yourself. I know what I want of ye, and when ye give it me, ye'll have all ye want and need."  
  
"Riddles!" he groaned. "Get out of here and leave me in peace."  
  
The bed shifted as she tucked her feet under herself, and she chuckled. "I bring ye peace," she said, "though ye may not recognize it at first."  
  
Snape sat up, trembling with - fear? Anger? He flung out his long arm and pointed at the door, a gesture with which his students were most familiar - "Get out! I want nothing of you!" he roared.  
  
Brigit smiled that small, inscrutable smile. She leaned forward, gazing into his furious face, and seized his ear. "Ow!" he yelled. Her fingers were unimaginably strong, and as he struggled to rid himself of her pincers grip, she aimed a fist at his other ear and boxed it soundly. His jaw dropped with astonishment, and Brigit laughed in his face. She seized his shoulders and pinned him down on the bed, climbing on top of him and sitting down firmly on his thighs.  
  
"Now," she purred, "that I have your attention."  
  
Snape's ear rang, and his lips trembled. He was at once a small boy whose ears had been boxed for some infraction, and he felt tears gather in his eyes. "What - what-"  
  
Brigit leaned over him, her bright hair more gold than red in the firelight. He noted that her eyes were bright blue with flecks of gold: unearthly, and that her small ears had finely pointed tips; elven. She placed the palm of her hand on his chest, and his focus shifted from his aching head and his outrage, to her. Fey, those ears. Brigit took his hand and placed it on her shoulder. He could feel the delicate bones. Like a bird, thin fine bones.I feel something, what is it? Trembling, hungry, needing something needing him..  
  
Brigit began slowly to unbutton his jacket. He touched her white arm; soft, with fine golden down on it. He drew his finger over the traceries of blue veins, and she shrank and giggled: ticklish. Then she held out her arm for more. He ran a finger over the porcelain skin again, and felt the tickle in his own arm. He looked in her eyes questioningly, not knowing what he asked. Brigit heaved him upwards effortlessly and pulled his jacket off, then let him fall back. She unbuttoned his linen shirt and bent forward until her hair touched his naked chest softly, ticklingly.  
  
He gasped. Slowly, she ran her hand over his breast, down over his ribcage, and he squirmed with the unfamiliar sensation of being tickled: tiny beings running over his skin, leaving trails of shivers behind.  
  
Hesitantly, he traced the line of her collarbone to her neck, to her cheek. She turned her head and her lips brushed his palm. She leaned closer, and he could see, in the low neck of her cambric shift, twin white does, as the Psalmist called them. She needs, she needs. She kissed him, a soft, sweet kiss. She tasted like honey and fruits, like green plants and moss. He undid the three buttons of her shift, and she dropped it off her arms in back of her. The white does that were twins rested in his palms.  
  
Her hands stroked down his ribs, along his arms, and then she moved off him and began to unbutton his trousers. He had been so absorbed in her that he had not noticed his own growing desire. He looked up at her: he had no idea of what to say, so he said nothing, only found and pulled the ribbon that held her girdle.  
  
Brigit sat back on her heels and looked at him for a long moment. She pulled his trousers off in one smooth movement, and then she bent over him, fastened her teeth in the waist of his small breeches and pulled them straight off. As she did so, her skirt collapsed down to her ankles and she kicked it aside.  
  
He knew, he knew what she craved, and his only thought was to provide her with what she needed, to feed her hunger, to hold her and give her release from her aching longing. "Now ye will know what I know," Brigit whispered.  
  
He lay over her, feeling her hot and bedewed with sweat and soft and slippery all at once. Then, his mind was inside her mind as his body was inside her body, and he felt the trembling shocks that racked her; felt her skin under his hand as he touched her and felt her skin melt from the inside out; felt her pounding heart in his chest and the clench of her muscles in his loins. At one point his back arched and he screamed mindlessly, as every nerve in her body threatened to explode at the same time. Brigit rolled over on him, her hands in his hair, her breathing ragged, her skin flushed, and again, with complete certainty, he knew because he felt what she felt. He brought her to the edge of the abyss of passion and over; holding her, moving with her until her she detonated into a million little moving points of light around the supernova that was he. 


	7. Chaper 7: Rote Learning

Chapter 7.  Rote Learning 

****

_Have I died?  Is there anything left of me?  _Snape lay supine, as still as a corpse.  He felt strangely numb and tingling at the same time, as if all of his nerve endings had fired and were now sputtering, unable to recharge.  He tried to will awareness back into his hands and his head and could not.  He opened his eyes.  Sensation returned slowly, and he could still feel Brigit's warmth against his side, her arm across his chest and her leg over his.

He must have slept; there was faint daylight filtering through his one small window.  His brain was muzzy and seemed far apart from the rest of him, which was now aware that the warmth had dissipated and he was alone.  Did I dream this_, _he wondered.

He felt an utter fool, trying to come to terms with what he feared was only his dream, in which he actually felt what a woman feels when making love.  He was rattled to his very core; he had had _no idea_ that a woman's climax, in its mounting, protracted enormity, was so different than a man's.  Yes, one could compare a series of earthquakes ending in a cataclysm to a single spurt from a geyser.  No, one could not compare the overwhelming scream of every nerve ending right down to the fingertips, to a strictly localized pulse and release.  _If I felt even a tiny portion of what she feels in her –in her _earlobes_, I would have a heart attack and die. _But he had not died; he had felt what she felt, given the difference in anatomy.  

_And I could do that!  I could cause that phenomenon, bring her to the edge of the universe and fall off its edge together with her!  _But, he thought sourly, although he had done it, he had no idea _how_ he had done it; he had been so busy experiencing what she felt.  His encounters with women had, in his past as a Death Eater, been brief and brutal; he _cringed_ when he remembered the torments he had visited on his victims.  All, all for his momentary pleasure.  

He was alone.  Brigit was gone: had she ever been there?  Now what?  Was he to be harried by these Celtic harridans, bedevilled by these she-Druids, until he learned whatever it was that the Mother wanted him to learn?  "To please her daughters."  Well, hadn't he done just that?

No, he thought, he hadn't.  He'd been taken on a brief tour of the _terra incognita_ of a woman's experience.  He remembered that he had wanted to _provide her with what she needed, to feed her hunger, to hold her and give her release from her aching longing_- but that was not all of it.

Well, it was another workday.  He rose, bathed and shaved, dressed himself and went to work.

He was giving out homework assignments for his first class when he realised that he had not eaten breakfast.  He would never have thought of it if he hadn't glimpsed the jelly babies being handed round amongst a gaggle of Ravenclaw students.  He was thankful for a morning not made hideous by a ravening appetite, and considered that coffee would be welcome if not mandatory.  A moment later, he had a large mug of steaming black coffee in his hand, and sipped at it as he lay out his lesson plan for the Gryffindors who were beginning to take their seats.

The Professor was in his usual form for the rest of the morning, terrorising several snivelling Gryffindor chaps and reducing two young ladies to tears.  He levied Detention with a lavish hand; shut his books with a snap and exited the laboratory.  He had with him a new monograph of Vishnivsky's on the effects of atmospheric pressure on absorption of toxins in the bloodstream, and he was eager to delve into it.  He closeted himself in his office for the next hour, undisturbed, to read the monograph and compose a letter to Vishnivsky.  By the time he was done, the afternoon break was almost over and he had an hour until Slytherin class.

The dining hall was deserted.  That was just how he liked it, and he sat down at the end of one of the long tables.  A little house-elf sidled over to him: "Master, Olaf bring you soup and some sangwich you like."  Snape nodded, and in a trice the elf returned with his luncheon.  Snape drank the soup off in a couple of swallows, and nibbled at the sandwich as he perused a textbook.  _Back to normal,_ he thought.  Thank Hermes Trismegistus and all his minions, back to normal.

The rest of the day was uneventful.  He was not distracted; he was not plagued by strange smells or visions, and his path was, thankfully, uncrossed by lady druids intent on driving him insane.  He was on his way to his laboratory after classes were done, when he felt a brush of air against his ear, and a fluffy brown and white owl alighted on his shoulder.  He took the note from its beak, and read it.  How odd:  Headmaster Dumbledore invited him for a drink.  That was not odd – the formal invitation was.  Snape dematerialised the note, and made his way to Dumbledore's suite.

Snape accepted a third glass of wine from the Headmaster.  "I've never felt so stupid," he grated, "and I can't think why in the name of the nine Hells _I _should be the subject of these females' evangelistic fervour."

"They've told you the truth, Severus," Dumbledore stated.  "Well, it's _their_ truth, and it should be respected as such.  They believe in the dual nature of the Almighty, male and female together, and they represent the female side.  Their beliefs are naturalistic, simple, and in many ways naïve.  They believe that the closer one is to Nature, the happier one can be.  Myself, I've always held that to follow one's heart is the shortest path to contentment."

Snape started.  "Are _you_ a druid?"

Dumbledore chuckled.  "Among other things. It's very simple, Severus.  We are made to be children of Nature, and rather than fighting against it, I've found that it's beneficial to go along with it.  Go with the flow, as it is."

"Their flow seems to be preoccupied with sex," grumbled Snape.  "It seems that the chief way they worship their Goddess is by having sex, and they have surely found me wanting, in need of intensive tutoring.  Again I ask:  why _me? _Why not Lockhart, or Black?"

Dumbledore laughed loudly.  "Come, now, Severus.  It isn't_ that_ simple.  They've discovered that you have problems not only with sex, but with women, your past and yourself."

Snape winced.  Although he could not voice it even to himself, it was true:  there was a small, hard, frozen chunk in his spirit, and it manifested itself not only as the ivy Dame Angharad said was twined invisibly about his loins, keeping him from expressing his sexuality, but also as a black hole into which the warmth of human connection fell endlessly, leaving him cold, abandoned and bereft no matter how intense the encounter.

Snape looked down into the depths of the wine.  There were feelings banging at the inside of his head, thoughts he could not put into words, emotions that had no names and could not be expressed.  He looked up.

Albus Dumbledore put his hand on the younger man's shoulder and looked into his bottomless black eyes.  Never had he met anyone so sad, so empty.  And that, he realised, is where the change had to be made.  "Severus," he said gently, "It has to begin with the spirit.  This may make no sense to you now, but you will be healed when you can ask to be filled, when you can allow your soul to embrace another soul with compassion, with tenderness and with generosity."

Snape's greasy black hair hid his face.  In an almost inaudible voice he said, "I wish I could understand what you've just said, Albus."

"You won't be able to analyse it as if it were a potion," Dumbledore answered.  "One day your spirit will be moved, and the best you can hope for is that you follow where it takes you without question.  When you can do that, all will be revealed."

Severus Snape stood up, and Dumbledore stood with him.  For the first time in their acquaintance, Snape held out his arms, and the Headmaster embraced him, patted him on the back and then let him go.  "It's a start," the old man said to himself.

The Potions Master left the Headmaster's suite.  He walked out onto the colonnaded balcony to watch the sun sink slowly over Hogsmeade.  Purple, taupe and rose-gold clouds drifted across a sky that shaded from azure to light blue to lemon at the horizon, and the poignant song of a mourning dove saluted the coming night.  

Snape leaned his arms on the balcony railing and perceived the yawning emptiness inside himself.  _I have been looking at things the wrong way round, _he thought.  _Shall I spend the rest of my life alone?  To never have a woman in my bed because she wants to be there, not because she has no other place to sleep or because I pay her to be there?  No-one to walk along the riverbank with, to sit with by the fire and read each other poetry, to cook supper together; no-one to go riding with, broom or horse…no-one to share the day's minutiae with.  _And, he thought, _when I grow old, and I feel it approaching rapidly,_ _no-one to walk hand in hand with, slowly, enjoying the sunlight, so familiar that words are few._

_Who will see into my soul?  Who could have the patience and perseverance to look beyond the ugly git, the bilious-tempered ogre? Who could find something to love in me, when I can find nothing of the sort in myself?_ Somewhere someone was playing Offenbach's _Tales of Hoffman_ on the harpsichord, the _Barcarole_, slow, sensual, and beguiling.  A small voice inside his head said, _and when will you, Severus Snape, learn to look beyond the face and body of a woman, to see into her spirit and heart, to find something to love in _her?

Slowly he left the balcony and walked towards the moving staircases. _I know, _he thought, _what heartache feels like .It is the realisation of how alone I truly am._

Hermione closed the harpsichord.  The languorous notes of the _Barcarole_ had seemed the perfect tribute to the gorgeous sunset.  She had looked up, in the middle of playing, and had seen a figure on the balcony a floor above her, visible through the high open colonnade that circled the Great Hall.  The figure stood motionless, then a breeze lifted the long full cloak to whip it backwards, and she recognised Snape.  As she played she wondered why he was there so still.

The man was a conundrum.  She acknowledged his brilliant mind, his skill, his thoroughness and attention to detail, his bravery and utter trustworthiness.  _Someday,_ she said to herself, _someone will bash down Snape's portcullis, storm his redoubt, swim his moat and throw open his prison door.  _She smiled.  And he, instead of fighting back, will hold out his arms to his conqueror.  She shook her head, her curls bouncing across her face, and turned towards the moving staircases, banging full on into the subject of her musings.  Instinctively, he reached out to steady her, and she put her hands in his.  She looked up at him, seeing the tracks of tears on his lean cheeks.  Holding on to his hand, she towed him over to the common room, over to the fireplace, and pushed him into a chair.

He was unable to speak.  _Is this one a Druid as well?_

_"_Professor, there's nothing like a cup of tea to put the world into perspective," Hermione stated.  A wave of her wand brought a teapot with an elaborate tea cosy over it, two cups, saucers, spoons, sugar and milk and a plate of biscuits to the small table in front of the hearth.

She poured a cup of tea, added a bit of milk to it, and handed it to him.  Wordlessly, he took it from her hand.  Hermione sat down in the armchair facing his, her feet stretched out towards the fire.  She helped herself to tea.  Finally he allowed himself to look at her, at her plain little face, peaceful and composed in front of her incredible brain, relaxed and self-possessed in his company.  He lifted his teacup by the handle and saluted her with it, then took a sip.  Hermione watched him over the rim of her cup; his eyes closed briefly as he drank.  The corners of her mouth turned up in that small, secret smile that has driven Irishmen to war and to drink for millennia.

(A/N: Fear not!  This is not your usual SS/HG story, but I promise it will be worth your while.  Chapter 8 is almost ready.)

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	8. Chapter 8 The Potions Masters' Conferen...

**_Chapter 8    The Potion Masters'Conference_**

"I had no idea there were so many Potions specialists in the world!"  Hermione tried to distribute her load of notebooks and texts between both arms as they made their way down the crowded corridor.  "What's the next lecture?"

 Snape, two long-legged strides ahead of her, did not bother to turn his head.  "New Developments in Reagents," he said.  "Didn't bother to bring your schedule with you, eh, Miss Granger?  Too distracted?"

She made a face at his back, thinking that she would rather have cocked a snook at if him if she had a free hand.  Of course, she was mightily honoured that she should have been invited to attend the Potions Masters' International Conference with her famous teacher.  He did not deign to acknowledge that it was her experiment, much derided by himself in the beginning, that won the Masters' competition, and it was her experiment, now refined, codified and verified, that they would demonstrate in a couple of hours, to the huge assemblage of dignitaries, geniuses, experts and just plain potions wogs that would fill the auditorium.

Snape stood still at the door of the lecture room and waited until she stood beside him.  Then, he opened the door and swept through, leaving her to trail along in his wake. _I hate it when he does that_, she thought, and_ he does it all the time. He has to make an entrance, what an ego._

Where was that ego a month ago? She had been playing the harpsichord in the Common Room, bumped into him and seen the tears on his haggard face, and dragged him over to the fire where he sat, hunched over as if he were two hundred years old, staring unseeing into the flames, old ghosts and demons flickering in his black eyes.  She had never seen anyone so lonely, and that aloneness had wrenched her heart.  She had summoned tea, and they had sat for a while, drinking tea, saying little to each other.  When she saw some colour return to his face, she rose and went to the side of his chair.  She squatted on her heels next to him, and took his hand in hers.  She looked up into his face, and saw puzzlement and hope.  "Be still, it's all right," she whispered, as one would to a child.  Then she leaned her head against his knee, and his other hand gently touched her springy curls.  They had stayed thus for a long time, and she had been content in his presence.  .  

When she heard the chimes announcing dinner, she had put her hand under his elbow and gotten him up out of the chair, walked him to the dining-hall, and when he stopped, trembling, unable to enter, she turned him around and brought him to his rooms.  He had stopped at the entrance of his study, straightened his back, and looked at her with weariness beneath his dignity.  "Thank you, Miss Granger," he said.  "I shall be all right now."  She had felt his hand tighten on hers, and then she had fled.

The next day, Professor Snape was his usual surly self, and she found herself wondering whether she had dreamed the previous afternoon.  What did it cost him to suppress his humanity, swallow his tears?  She had felt a fatherly presence from him when he put his hand on her hair; she had rested her head on his knee, like a child secure with her parent.  How could she feel a mother's tenderness towards him at one moment, and a child's confidence the next?  And yearn to brain him with a Quidditch bat withal?

During the next few weeks, everyone's unfavourite greasy git was as usual:  nasty, sarcastic, exacting and brilliant.  Neville Longbottom ended up in hospital yet again; Gryffindor was fined points until they despaired of finishing the form; Slytherin got away with everything short of murder, and the advanced students received a new challenge:  to enter the qualifications for the Potions Masters' International Competition.

Hermione _knew_ that she could reach the finals.  It was not for nothing that she was an intern to Professor Snape, one step above the student aides and one step below apprentices.  An unwavering focus, precise attention to detail and the ability to compute Arithmancy formulas in her head had earned her Snape's grudging approval.  Her willingness to explore new territory, take risks and their consequences with aplomb and defuse Snape's attempts to bully her with a calm and serpentine stare that rivalled his own, garnered her the favoured position.

She loved mathematics for its logic and order, and thereby Potions.  Although most potions were brewed for medicinal or agricultural use, there were others that offered more challenge: they changed one's appearance, attracted or repelled water/heat/cold/others; some that were specific to Transformation.  Everything Hermione studied had, it seems, some relation to either maths or potions, or both.  Lately, her elective class in Runes had given her quite a different view.

The Runes Mistress was a druid, and probably as old as the Standing Stones.  Hermione liked her instinctively; the small, slender woman in her archaic dress had a most interesting view of the universe and of life in general.  Mostly girls from Hufflepuff and Gryffindor attended the Runes classes; immature students who thought that Runes was a version of Tarot used primarily to identify and attract one's true love.  Hermione saw something quite different:  a mystic's view of the world (or worlds), and interpretation on many levels.  It was the Runes Mistress who gave Hermione the idea for her Potions competition entry.

"The world entire exists on many levels at once," stated Dame Angharad.  She looked around at the vacant or puzzled expressions on her students' faces.  Except for Miss Granger: she sat, chin in hand, riveted, following the lesson with her heart as well as her mind.  _There's much in that curly head,_ Dame Angharad thought to herself.  At the end of the lesson, she invited Hermione to stay and have a go at throwing the Runestones herself.

_A Champion.  She is, as I suspected, a mystic warrior, and she is girding for battle.  Now, whom shall she save?  _ "Now, Miss Granger, how would it be if we could command the Runes' ability to move through time, if we ourselves could go backwards and witness what has already pased, or forwards and know what is yet to come?  

"Isn't that dangerous?  What if going back in time results in someone's never being born, or something like that?"

Dame Angharad laughed.  "Tis never so!  Your Muggle writers scare children by telling them tales of time travel, and their grandsires never met, and they were therefore never born!  Ye can't change the past, and the future is unknown to us.  The Runes tell us only what we might expect if the world turns one certain way – but the ley-lines cross all worlds, and we do not know where we shall come out."

Hermione frowned.  "Yet the Runes can do it.  What if – what if we could _perceive_ what the Runes see, even if only momentarily?"

The Green Lady placed several runestones on the triskellion, the patterned cloth that gives order to the reading, and pondered the arrangement.

"T'would need the passing of the doors of perception," she said. "The runes would tie ye to the present, so ye never need be lost, but ye would need to come out of yourself."

"I could do it!"  Hermione exclaimed.  "A potion that would surround one with an aura of _opening_, releasing one from the perceptual hold on the moment, yet contain one – one would have to breathe it, and as long as one _breathes it_ one can follow the runes…" She bounced up and down on her chair with excitement.

Dame Angharad laughed to see her enthusiasm.  "Well, then, to your cauldrons and elixirs!  Try to do it – I can see a fine mist, surrounding the reader…" Hermione could contain herself no longer.  She hugged the Runes Mistress round the shoulders and ran out in the direction of the Library.

It took her four weeks to come up with a working prototype of the Doors of Perception potion.  When she explained it to Professor Snape, using a very simple layout of six runestones, he almost had a fit of apoplexy.  "Runes!" he bellowed.  "Whatever ridiculous nonsense is this, Miss Granger? When I think of the galleons wasted on purchasing ingredients for this _childish_ exercise—"

She interrupted him.  "Professor, you're missing my point entirely.  How would you like to be able to witness firsthand what the Dark Lord has in mind for you in the near future?  How would you like to be able to see clearly what predisposed a sufferer to a chronic disease?"

He had to admit that there were useful applications for her invention; he objected to the runes because, for reasons best known to himself, he despised the Runes Mistress.  Hermione didn't argue with him.  After several dozen unsuccessful starts, she came up with a potion that, when placed in an atomiser, produced a fine mist that lingered in the air for a few moments.  She found that when she sprayed the mist directly in front of her face and stepped into it, she had the odd sensation of being inside a lens – a glass lens that changed the look of everything seen through it.  She could see the rot barely beginning in a piece of fruit; mould on a wall, the immature eggs inside a chicken.

Well, that much was fine:  the doors of perception had been cleansed, and one could see clearly through them.  Now, the runes.  She sought the Runes Mistress' help.

She lay out a simple pattern taught to her by Dame Angharad:  Then, she sprayed the mist:  nothing.  She saw the rune pieces, as they had been when they were brand new, colourful patterns incised into the bone.  "You must cast the runes and read them," said Dame Angharad.  "Then we will see what there is to be seen."  With much coaching, Hermione read, for hersel, an enigmatic journey, a reversal of fortune, a time of peril and something to do with money.  Then she sprayed the potion.  She was inside the lens once more, seeing a young man and woman trudging wearily down a road, a pack – a child! On the father's back a child rode – it was herself.  Her mother, walking alongside, tripped on a stone and fell down, the father bent to help her, and the child sailed over his head – and the mist dissipated; she was looking at the triskellion and the rune pieces.

"It worked!" she enthused.  "My mother used to tell me that I fell off my father's back and clouted my head, and that is why I am a Muggle-born wizard!"  The Runes Mistress laughed with her.  "I want to try again!" cried Hermione.

"Not today, not today, my love," said Dame Angharad.  "You must do this sparingly.  And always remember: the runes never fall the same way twice.  You don't know what you will see."

Hermione thanked her and ran to find Professor Snape.  The Potions Master was returning from a Quidditch match with a most excruciating expression on his face:  Slytherin had not done well.

"Professor!" she cried, pouncing on his arm and dragging him along.  "Come and see!  You can't _imagine_ how splendidly the Doors of Perception work!"  I want to submit it to the competition!"

Snape peeled her hands off his arm and stopped stock-still.  "Miss Granger," he said icily, "I will not waste my time on gimcrack oddities.  Bring me documentation.  Then we will discuss your – er – experiment."

He turned away with a swirl of his cloak and was gone.  "Damn!" muttered Hermione.  Documentation indeed:  twelve proven trials in a row, each one exhaustively logged.  Grimly she returned to her quarters.  She was running out of time:  entries for the Potion Masters' Conference Competition had to be submitted before the weekend.

Hermione spent every available moment on the Doors of Perception.  She brewed several batches of the potion, noting down every ingredient and proportion and step in the preparation.  With Dame Angharad's help, she studied the lore of runes and how to read them. She ran trials; each throw of the runes with each of the potions, until she had twenty in a row.  She found that as she worked, she experienced a brief wave of disorientation after the mist dissipated.  This was disconcerting, because she threw the runes for herself, and saw much that she did not understand.

She enlisted the help of her good friends Ron and Harry, and did ten trials each for them.  Here, it was not so simple; she had less experience reading the runes for others, but as she persevered, she learned more.  Harry's readings were obscure; she concentrated on Ron, and even dragged Professor McGonagall into her efforts.

At last, on Friday afternoon, the documentation was complete. Hermione sought out Professor Snape at the door of his last class of the day.  House elves scurried around the laboratory, cleaning and polishing and removing the fragments of yet another exploded cauldron.  Snape looked at her, standing in the doorway with her parchment in one hand, tapping it nervously against the other.

"Well?  The doorpost appears sound, Miss Granger, you do not need to hold it up," he snapped.  "What is it?"

Hermione stepped forward and handed him the parchment.  "Here it is, Professor," she said.  "The Doors of Perception, my documentation.  Twenty successful trials plus another ten for other subjects.  I've brought my materials for you, to perform a demonstration."   She put a small packet on the laboratory bench, withdrew her wand from her sleeve and the packet expanded into a tray containing her runestones and triskellion, three phials of the Doors of Perception potion, a notebook and a quill.

Snape perused the objects.  "Really," he said impatiently, "I'm wanted for a staff meeting, Miss Granger.  I'm sure your little experiment can wait."  He prepared to gather his books.

Hermione literally saw red.  "No!" she cried.  "You know full well that tonight's the deadline for the competition, Professor, and you know full well that I've done it, I said I could and I've done it! Now you'll witness my demonstration and sign off on my entry."  She was breathing hard, her heart pounding.

The Potions Master cleared away a space on the bench next to her materials.  He pulled over a stool, sat down on it, and looked at her with those eerie black eyes.  "Proceed," he said.

Hermione was nonplussed.  She had expected an argument, but once more the man had surprised her. She spread out the triskellion and lined up her three atomisers.  She took the runestones out of their pouch; they were warm in her hand.   To her astonishment, Snape held out his right hand, palm up.  _He's had his runes told before_.   She poured them into his hand; he closed his fingers on them.

She took runestones at random from his hand and built the Celtic cross on the triskellion.  The other runestones went back into their pouch.  The stones told a simple tale:  hard times past, ambiguous present and ominous future.  Hermione explained the meanings as clearly and simply as she could, while Snape stared at the runestones.  "I don't believe in this," he said.

"Well, you must finish the experiment, Professor, and then let us see what you believe or don't believe," she said tartly.  He stood up and moved directly in front of the pattern of stones on the cloth.  Hermione handed him the atomiser marked, "Batch One."  

"One full spray, directly in front of your face, Professor," she said.  Snape pushed the plunger and leaned forward slightly.  His face went vacant for a moment, then his jaw dropped with astonishment.  The mist was gone, and Snape sat down heavily on the stool.

"What did you see?"  Hermione demanded.  "Did it work?"

Snape's hooded eyes turned in her direction.  In a barely audible voice, he replied, "It works, Miss Granger.  It works perfectly."

"Oh!" she cried.  "I'm so glad!  Then you'll approve it, Professor?" She tugged on his arm, realised what she was doing and backed away from him hastily.

"Yes," he said.  "I will approve it and send it on.  Congratulations, Miss Granger.  You have done well."  He rose, took her parchment documentation and strode to the door.  He turned sharply, his cloak swirling about him.  "I shall send your experiment to the competition prefects. Thank your Runes Mistress for her assistance."  And he swept out of the door.  _Gods, he has to make an exit like an actor._

Within a week, word had come that her experiment had indeed made it into the finals, and a practical demonstration at the Potions Masters' Conference would be expected.  Trust Snape to toss the news over his shoulder in the most offhand manner as he passed her in a corridor.  Hermione shrieked and ran after him, but he had already disappeared around a corner; she suspected that he had Apparated to get away from her.  She flew down the moving staircases to Dame Angharad's classroom just as a group of senior Ravenclaws was exiting.

The Green Lady looked up from her parchment diagrams and scrolls.  "Well, Miss Granger, have you news?"  

"Dame Angharad, I've made it into the finals!"  Hermione panted, and flung herself into a chair next to the Runes Mistress' desk.  "And, can you imagine, Professor Snape actually _thanked_ you for helping me?"

The Green Lady smiled.  " 'Tis hard for him, my dear.  Of late he's learned some lessons he never thought he would learn, and there's much more ahead.  A piece of work he is, indeed."

Hermione frowned. "Maybe that's why – Dame Angharad, may I tell you?  You won't say anything?"  The lady nodded. "I thought he must be sick.  He's been even odder than usual lately (here, Dame Angharad's smile quirked at the corners of her mouth) and he was in tears a few weeks ago – I was playing the harpsichord, and I saw him standing still on the colonnade, listening.  When he came down, there were tears on his face, and he looked perfectly dreadful – I dragged him into the common room, and gave him tea…"

Dame Angharad had Seen Hermione take the Potions Master's hand and lay her head against his knee.  She had Seen Snape touch the young woman's curly hair softly, and Seen the unaccustomed tenderness in his face.  _A champion…."_

She sat down at her desk.  "Dear Hermione, it is well that you comforted him.  He needs it desperately, although he does not seem to deserve it.  Ye may not know it, but he wants you to win the competition, and he is proud of you."

"Would it kill him to let me know?" 

Dame Angharad patted her hand.  "No, 'twouldn't kill him, but himself is unused to considering the feelings of others, and it feels odd to him when he does do it.  Indulge him, then, and when the opportunity presents itself, dear sister, if ye can teach him anything, do so."  She rose and lay her hand on Hermione's forehead.  "Blessed be," she said, and looking into the young woman's chocolate brown eyes, Dame Angharad Saw blooming wild roses.

***

The auditorium was vast, larger by three times than Hogwarts' Great Hall expanded to its full interdimensional size.  A prefect led Hermione and Professor Snape up to the stage, and seated them next to the other contest finalists, each one an intern with a mentor.  Hermione felt as if she was in a fog; all she could think of were the precise steps of the experiment, so familiar they were instinctive.  Snape sat next to her, still as a stone.

"Hogwarts, Master Severus Snape," someone intoned.  Snape stood up, threw back his cloak and strode to the long table at the front of the stage.  He bowed.  "Severus Snape, Potions Master," he said.  "My intern, Hermione Granger, and her experiment, the Doors of Perception."  He wheeled and beckoned to her, and she rose, suddenly in desperate need of the loo.  _I should have gone before," _she thought.  _Gods, I hope I don't pee down my leg with nerves._

She felt a warmth on her forehead, and recalled Dame Angharad's blessing.  Confidently, she walked to the table, bowed to the assemblage, said her name and lay out her experiment.  She took the runes from their pouch, and looked expectantly at Snape.  He hesitated only a moment, then he indicated the Master Prefect.   "Sir, will you judge?"  The old man hobbled over to the table, bobbed his head cheerfully, looked through his glasses at the pretty contestant, and then perched them on his head.  "Proceed, young lady," he said.

Hermione placed the runestones in the Master Prefect's hand.  He held them, then opened his hand, and she set out the pattern.  She looked at it: quite clear – fortuitous past, wealthy present and auspicious future – and handed the old gent the atomiser.  He looked at it closely, nodded and sprayed a mist in front of his face.  

His expression went blank -  and then he sneezed.  The air began to vibrate in front and around him, and Hermione and Snape, as one, grabbed his arms and attempted to pull him backward out of the mist.  He flew backwards, as the reaction took them, and they flew forward.  Hermione pitched headfirst into a ringing, racketing tunnel, and flailed out, screaming.  A hand clasped her own, and the air flew out of her lungs.


	9. Chapter 9 Lost in Whenever

Chapter 9  Lost in Whenever

Hermione gasped and coughed as her consciousness returned, and spluttered, choking on water.  _Drowning! _ She tried to flail her arms, to propel herself to the surface.  She was lying on the ground, on muddy, wet earth, with her face in a puddle.  Needles of ice stuck her face and hands: sleet mixed with rain.  She struggled to open eyes that felt pasted shut. She raised her head, and coughed again.  A shudder ran through her; her garments were soaked through.  _Where was she?_ All was dark; dark and a downpour.  She managed to sit up.  Her neck and back ached. 

Snape!  A figure next to her stirred and moaned.  The Potions Master lay in an ungainly heap, his head on a rock, his feet in the puddle where her head had been.  She crawled over to his side.  He was absolutely still. She tried to call his name, and coughed up more water.  She plucked at his soaked sleeve.  Finally she croaked, "Professor!  Get up!" He stirred, choked and retched water.  She put her arm around his shoulders, and he turned his head towards her.  She could barely see him or anything else, the rain poured down in sheets.  Holding on to each other, they managed to gain their feet. 

"Are you all right?" he husked, coughing. 

"Yes, come on, let's get out of this rain."  They could see nothing of where they were.  They walked forward, bent against the driving rain, until Snape bumped into a tree.  At least there was that:  they felt their way along, through what must be a forest.  A shape bulked in the half-light – could it be?  It resembled a familiar structure, but oddly out of place.  Hermione looked all around: there was only this building, and nothing else. Could it be Hagrid's cottage, in the middle of nowhere?  If it was, where was Hogwarts?

As they approached they could see, thank the gods; it_ was_ Hagrid's cottage!  Heads down, they ran through the ice-rain.  The door was open, and they burst inside.  It was empty except for a rope bed and a narrow bench; the fireplace was gone. There was a ring of large stones on the floor:  a fire-pit?  No chimney hole, either. What had happened?  Where was Hagrid?  Why was Hogwarts gone although this small structure was the same? Well, it wasn't quite the same. Snape examined the wood plank walls. They were almost new, yet Hagrid's cottage was hundreds of years old.  The one small window was paned in parchment, not Hagrid's beloved bottle-bottom glass.  The roof (thank Merlin it didn't leak) was thatch, not shingle.  Who lived there now with only a rope bed, obviously not half-giant-sized, and a bench, no fireplace, no wardrobe, no stove and surely no toilet? 

It was freezing cold and damp in the cottage. Snape tried a warming charm, a drying charm, and a fireplace-building spell, all to no avail.  Finally, he had to use a vesta to light the one tiny oil lamp on the small bench against the wall.  No charm would work in that dreary place. 

The bed was made up with quilts and pillows and looked decent enough; he peeled back the coverlet, expecting dank sheets and mildew.  But there was none: the plain cotton sheets were dry and smooth and the pillows were dry as well.  He looked under it:  no chamber pot.  Well, whoever lived there was not at home. Hermione stood in the doorway, looking about with shock.   "Come here," he commanded, holding out his hand to her.  

She stood still, shivering, her wet robes clutched about her.  "Well? Are you going to stand there, soaked to the skin, or are you going to get dry?" 

She glared at him.  "You're wetter than I am.  We can't make a fire unless we burn the furniture, and I don't see any towels."  She looked around for a chair, a footstool, anything that might be ignited.  There was nothing, only that bed and the narrow bench.  One bed.  In this peculiar hut, in the middle of nowhere, in a place where magic refused to work, and in the midst of a ferocious storm: a bed and precious little else.  Not even a basin and ewer; no water.  The wind howled and rattled the shutters. The one tiny lamp guttered fitfully in the draft.

Snape began to take off his soaked clothing, laying it over the bench.  Finally he was down to his small breeches and a thin undershirt, chilled but not damp.  His heavy cloak and thick woollen jacket had protected him somewhat, but it was a relief to get them off; they seemed to have absorbed a hundredweight of cold rain apiece.  He got into the bed and prepared to lie down.  Damn her; let her stand there and freeze.

She walked over slowly and took off her sodden cloak.  Her hair lay in damp strings on her back.  He could not let her be thus:  he pulled a pillowslip off one of the pillows, got up and handed it to her.  "Dry your hair at least," he said. 

She looked up at him.  "Thank you," she said, between chattering teeth, rubbing her hair with the pillowslip.  _He could not let her be thus: _he unbuttoned her robe and pulled it off her arms, and she did not resist.  He pulled her blouse off over her head, and unbuttoned her skirt, which fell to the floor.  She looked so tiny, so fragile in her camisole and knickers, so wet that her pale skin showed through them.  He took her hand and led her over to the bed, sat her on the edge and took the wet garments off her, including her pathetic soaked stockings, quickly wrapping her in a sheet and covering her with a quilt.  He bunched pillows around her shoulders.  Her chocolate brown eyes followed him. 

He walked round the bed and got into it from the other side.  He could feel her trembling.  _Do the right thing, man,_ he told himself. _The Mother would approve, I suppose. _ "Now," he said, "let's get you warmed up." 

"Thank you," she whispered.  She turned onto her side and squirmed backwards towards him, until she fit against him like a spoon nested with another spoon.  

"Merlin's balls, woman, your bum's like ice!" he growled, and was rewarded with a snort of laughter from the woman he had often referred to during the past seven years as a rotten little thing. 

"I'll be warm soon, Professor," she murmured, wriggling those chilly buttocks, cold even through the sheet, against his thighs, which protested with gooseflesh. 

"Stop writhing and settle down!  Or shall I warm you with the flat of my hand?" She turned over and stared at him. 

"You'd do that?  You'd _spank_ me?" 

"I'd like to _murder_ you.  You cock up _my_ demonstration and get us transported to this miserable whatever-it-is, drag me around in the sleet and rain, and now, you wretched ingrate, as snotty and arrogant as ever, you snort at my efforts to see to your comfort ---" 

She moved closer. "I'll welcome your effort, then, if you can do it without spanking me," said she, and lay her head against his shoulder.

Snape sighed.  _This must be another of my ridiculous dreams, _he thought.  _Druids and standing stones, and falling off the edge of the world with my arse tied up with ivy.   Soon I shall awaken in my own bed, in my own rooms.  I had hoped these nightmares were finished.  _He reached over her small frame and placed his long-fingered hand on the small of her back.  As he moved his touch down over the curve of her buttocks, her breath caught in her throat, and he felt her belly clench involuntarily. "Like that, do you?" His voice could be as harsh and cutting as gravel; now it was velvet. 

"Mmmm," he could feel her smile against his shoulder. Her hand crept up into his hair at his neck, and he tried unsuccessfully to stifle a groan. 

"Like that, do you?" she whispered. She stretched against him.  He could feel her heartbeat against his breast.  "We _should _sleep," said she, and put her feet, as frigid as icicles, on top of his. 

He recoiled, raised his head and looked down his nose at her.  "And how," he hissed, "do you expect me to sleep when you continue to place frozen portions of your anatomy on my helpless body?"  He glowered at her.  "And," he continued, "If you find the suffering you are causing me amusing, you can bloody well get out of this bed and sleep on the floor." 

He pushed her away from himself, and she stiffened.  She turned her head away from him, turned her back and moved to the very edge of the bed.  Her voice was almost inaudible:  "I don't know what I was thinking, that I could sleep in the same bed with you and not get into more trouble than I could handle." 

"You're no stranger to sleeping with men – I should say, _boys,_ as _the entire school_ is aware that you and your two idiot Gryffindor chums prefer snogging in Potter's bed to studying your lessons!" 

She sat upright, clutching the sheet to cover herself.  "How _could_ you?  You and_ the entire school_ know that I was one of many who gave Harry the body heat that saved his life after that Cruciatus curse! _Snogging _indeed:  you're _despicable_, Professor.  I can just imagine you sitting in your reeking dungeon, conjuring up scenes of students _snogging._ You're a voyeur!  And you have no right to judge me!  As for – oh! I can't _stand it – _cocking up 'your' creation, as I recall it, it is _my_ creation, and _you_ asked _me_ to accompany _you_." Her voice rose and then broke.  "And if you think for one minute that my idea of a pleasant evening is – is to be _stuck with you_ in this hideous shack, and – and – there's no loo…." She buried her head in her hands. 

"_I _did not choose our method of departure, Miss Granger, nor our destination, if you recall."  He sat up and regarded her, huddled miserably on the edge of the bed, trying to contain her sobs.  Her pale skin was covered in gooseflesh; her hands were blue.  _And she has to go to the loo, of course, women and their damned tiny bladders. _  

He remembered something.  It was a slim chance, but perhaps…He got out of the bed, not bothering to cover himself, and walked over to the bench.  He rummaged in the large pocket sewn to the inside of his cloak, and retrieved a small leather bag.  It was a rarity; it operated outside of the usual laws of magic. 

He held the bag in the palm of his hand and directed his gaze to it.  In his mind's eye it grew and flattened and became solid.  In his hands, it became a chamber pot.  Another minute's concentration and about two inches of water bubbled up into its bottom from some other plane of existence.  Carefully, he carried his creation over to the bed, and placed it on the floor in front of Hermione Granger. 

"There," he said.  "Now you have a pot to piss in, and there's even a window to throw it out of." His mouth quirked as he realised he had rephrased an old joke.  Hermione looked up, and then down, her eyes round with surprise.  Snape turned his back, stalked around to the other side of the bed, got in and covered himself up to his eyebrows.

He felt the bed shift as her slight weight left it.  He covered his ears with the quilt.  Her feet were silent; he started when she whispered, right in front of him, "Shall I leave it for you, on your side?" 

One black eye peered out of the quilt.  She was shivering, blue-lipped, and she had his magical chamber pot in her hand and started to bend down with it.  "Thank you," he said frostily, and she pushed it under the bed.  He sat up as she stood, and put out his hand to her.  "Miss Granger," he said.  "I did not mean to insult you. I know I generally _do_ mean to insult you, but not this time. Please come to bed."  He held the covers up for her to get in.

She looked at him.  The Mother help her, she had never entertained the slightest thought of lying in the same bed as Severus Snape, but his hand on her backside had surprised and unnerved her.  She hated to be proven wrong, especially to herself.  She got into the bed.  "Thank you for the chamber pot," she said.  "You can't imagine how miserable---"

"Miss Granger, I_ know_ the feeling of a painfully full bladder. I trust you are no longer miserable."

She settled on her side, facing him.  "I am miserable still," she said. "I'm feeling something I haven't felt before, and I don't know what to do about it."

He waited patiently. Discussing feelings was not one of his favourite pastimes, still, _the Mother asks you to open to her gifts…. Hermione Granger, the rotten little thing, a gift?_  He said nothing, but moved a touch closer to her.  "I'm listening," he said.

"You were talking about comforting me.  We haven't exactly been friendly for the past seven years, and I _have_ been a wretched prat.  But I've worked so closely with you for so long, I know your mind and your spirit. I even know that you like Muggle classical music.  Even so, I never took the time to look more closely.  And then, when I was playing the harpsichord, and you were so abysmally sad, I saw you, really, for the first time.  And I wanted to comfort you – and I did, and you let me." 

She reached out her hand and pushed his hair back from his face.  Her look was so tender, so gentle, so foreign to anything he knew.  "You touch me as if I were your child," he breathed.

She smiled.  "It's part of what I feel. You're a good deal older than I am, but there are times I feel like, well, _mothering_ you.  There are times I feel like your colleague – most times, I'd say – and then there are times when I feel like your child.  Now we are more than that; it's what's different."

:"Come here and give me a kiss," he said, his voice black velvet.  "Not like a mother, nor like a child."  He held out his arms and, icy feet and knees, gooseflesh, hard nipples and cold nose and all, she wrapped her arms around him and put her mouth on his. His lips were unexpectedly soft, pliant and warm.  Waves of male energy coursed through her body._ I'm melting into a jelly, _she thought.

_The Runes Mistress was right, _he realised. There was something in this little woman's indomitable spirit that_ touched_ him in so many ways.  It was right that he do the same for her.  Snape passed his hands over her back, over that chilly bum, still cold, warming her, pressing her closer.  Her eyes were wide, looking into his.  This was the firstreal kiss he had given and received from a woman in—what? Thirty years?  What he had done as a disciple of Voldemort could hardly be called kissing: it was about domination and invasion, causing pain instead of invoking pleasure. The soft, gentle touch of Hermione Granger's lips made his lips tingle and grow sensitive and want more of her kisses.  "Where do I begin with you?" he wondered.

"I'd say we've made a good start," she answered, moving her hands gently over his chest and shoulders.  "Would you take off this ugly undershirt and those worse breeches, please?"

"Ugly!  You have no practical sense, woman.  It's a special Scottish knit, and—"

"I might have known; it looks like knitted haggis—"

"_Damn! _ Why must you women take issue with my smallclothes—?"

"Aha! I'm not the only one to notice your dreadful taste in undergarments! Now, silk boxers –"

"_Naf off_ with your bloody silk boxers!" 

"Well, will you take them off or must I pull them off with my teeth?"

He stared at her. _Gods, no, please... _"Is this another dream?"

Hermione looked at him with surprise.  "You have dreams in which someone pulls off your undergarments with her teeth?  Have you been dreaming about me?"  She eased her hands beneath his undershirt and rolled it upwards.  He did not resist and let her take it off him.

"I've been having dreams, yes.  Disturbing dreams.  I don't know what's real any more."

"This _is _real.  I'm really here with you, at last, and I'll have no more excuses – Severus. Take off those breeches."  Without a word he complied. She rolled onto her back, and he looked down at her.

"At last indeed," he said, and unwrapped her from the sheet, as if she were a gift. He gathered her into his arms and abruptly the breath was sucked out of his lungs.  His ears were filled with roaring; he could see nothing.  He tried to call out to her, but he had no voice, and he fell endlessly, not knowing if she was with him.  Consciousness left him.

***


	10. Chapter 10 Reality and Dream

**_Chapter 10.  Reality and Dream_**

****

Momentum hurled them backwards.  Hermione landed on her back, legs splayed, her robes up over her head.  She gasped and breathed, her head spinning and her ears ringing.  A tug on her hand reminded her that Professor Snape had grabbed her as she tried to pull the Master Prefect out of the compromised Doors of Perception mist.

She sat up, and her memory clanged into place:  the icy rain, the strange forest, Hagrid's hut that wasn't Hagrid's – yet; _the rope bed and oh, Gods…_Hands pulled her to her feet.  Snape was already standing, looking at her with shock and surprise.  They were fully clothed, they were still at the Potions Masters' Conference, and the Master Prefect was harrumphing, preparing to speak.

Unsteadily, she returned to her seat, Snape beside her.  She dared not look directly at him.  The Master Prefect thanked them for their demonstration, and then went on to introduce the other contestants.  Hermione sat as still as she could, longing to be out of there.

Finally, all the experiments had been performed, and the prefects adjourned to judge them.  Snape stood over her.  "There's tea served," he said.  "I think we could use some."  She rose and followed him.

_"What happened?  Did I dream it?"  _

"If you did, so did I.  Are you all right?"

Hermione's hands were shaking badly.  She accepted a cup of tea and sat down in the nearest chair.  "Are _you _all right?"  Snape's normally sallow face was an unhealthy shade of green.  He sat down next to her and looked down at his cup and saucer

"I think so, Look, Miss Granger, your creation has some characteristics which might prove dangerous in the wrong hands."

"Ah, so it's my creation, is it?"  She could have bit her tongue.  "I'm sorry, Professor. My mind keeps wandering back to that – dream."

"I wasn't referring to that whatever-it-was.  When you demonstrated the experiment to me, I experienced a most unsettling effect which was not in keeping with either the runes or the potion."

"Tell me!" Hermione felt a chill of foreboding wrap itself around her neck and shoulders, like an unwelcome boa.

Snape set his cup and saucer down on a small table next to his chair.  He looked at the woman sitting next to him – _the rotten little thing –_ and his heart twisted in his breast.

"I am not sure whether I was looking at the future or the past," he said in an almost inaudible voice.

"The runes show both, as well as the present," Hermione said.  "Tell me the images you saw, and I'll try to match them up with the rune reading, so they can be interpreted."

He drew a breath.  "You know I don't think much of your runes.  In any case, they're fortune-telling tiles out of Celtic prehistory.  What have they to do with a Pliocene jungle?"

Hermione's jaw dropped.  "Pliocene!  What was it?"

Snape rose.  "I shall research it," he said, and that was the end of the subject.  "Are you coming?  The recess is over."

She trailed behind him back to the finalists' area.

After all the noise, the hurrahs, the applause, the heavy trophy, which, thank the gods, had its own levitation spell; the congratulations and the toasts, after the banquet of too much food, too much noise and too many speeches. Hermione was more than ready to go home.

She hadn't had any time to consider the Doors of Perception dream, as she had labelled it.  But she couldn't recover; it had been too real and too disturbing.  _When I'm home at Hogwarts, I'll be able to puzzle it out, I hope,_ she thought to herself.  Incredible – she and Snape, in bed together, preparing to Do It!  She expected to shudder, but instead she felt an unfamiliar and sad little quiver in the pit of her stomach, a quiver that wanted holding and _oh, Mother, no,_ some gentle stroking from inside…She clamped her lips together and stood straight, as Snape strode towards her.  

"Are you ready, Miss Granger?"

"Yes, Professor."

They Apparated to a point near the boundaries of Hogwarts, took their brooms from their pockets, restored them to their original size, and flew home.

Hermione, her hair rolled up in rags, laid out her clothes for the following day, made sure her books were all in order, set her wand on the bedside table and prepared to climb into her bed.  Crookshanks was comfortably ensconced on her pillow, in the pose that cats call The Silent One (and humans call the meat loaf with a head): paws tucked under chest, haunches raised.  He lifted his head, eyes slitted, and _Mrow_ed at her.

"Oh, Crook, I'm so glad to be home," she said, settling down. Crookshanks rose, stretched and deliberately walked onto her stomach.  He began the soothing kneading motions she loved, humming lullaby purrs as he worked.

 A moment later, there was a light tap on her door, and a soft voice with a Gaelic lilt called, "Hermione?  Are ye sleeping?"  Hermione sighed, sat up and waved her wand to open the door for Dame Angharad.  The Green Lady entered, closing the door behind her, and came over to sit on the edge of Hermione's bed. Crookshanks sniffed the druid's hand, rubbed his head against it, and went to curl up on a pillow.  Hermione burst into tears and put her head on Dame Angharad's lap.  "You won't believe what happened," she sobbed.

The Green Lady listened quietly, her brow furrowed.  "And so, then, after all that, ye had no pleasure of him?"

Hermione snorted.  "The only pleasure I could say I had was putting my freezing feet on him and making him jump," she said.

'Now, I Saw ye," smiled Dame Angharad.  "Ye had finally got him to rights, when the spell broke and ye were hurled home. "Tis frustratin' for ye to be ready to receive him, and himself ready as well, and all for naught."

'But," cried Hermione, "it was only a dream!"

"Not this time, love.  'Twasn't a dream at all, it was real as we are sitting here. 'Twas a pinch in the cloth of time, in which ye dwelled until it smoothed out again."

Hermione shuddered.  "What if we had been brought back as we were, naked as the day we were born, and him with a right boner—" She leaned against Dame Angharad's shoulder and giggled.  

"I daresay ye would have been the entertainment of the evening," said the Runes Mistress, "and—" she laughed until the tears ran from her eyes –"all the masters trying to cover ye with robing spells!"

They sat together for a while, Dame Angharad taking the rags out of Hermione's hair and tying her curls in elflocks. Hermione found it easy to speak to the druid of things that were too embarrassing to discuss with anyone else, and she took the opportunity to ask questions that had been on her mind.

"Dame Angharad, I've snogged with boys before, but I think it would have been different with the Professor.  His –_member-_ is rather large, and it seemed _curved_, and I don't know if it would have fit, but my body wanted it badly."

The Runes Mistress nodded and patted Hermione's hand.  "Yes, yes, a grown man's wand always seems so, and your Professor has all that a man should have to --"

"Wand?"  Hermione interrupted her.  "Why do you call it a – oh, I _see!"_ She blushed.  "It does its own kind of magic, doesn't it?"

"Yes, it is made for ye, and specially to pleasure ye, but it should not hurt at all, and ye should be able to enjoy it easily, once ye know how."

Hermione considered.  "Is he supposed to show me how?"

"Few men know, because they have no true understanding of a woman's body.  "Tis simple.  Although ye want to wrap your legs around him, 'tis better if ye do not so at first, 'twill make your passageway too short.  Let him enter slowly, slowly, and stay thus for a time."

"And stay still?"

"Just for a bit, until ye're used to the full feeling.  Then," her elfin smile played at the corners of her lips,  "rock him slowly, and find a nice pace for your dance of love."

Hermione hugged the druid.  "Thank you," she said. "It makes perfect sense.  I wasn't sure how to begin with that great wand_."_

"Well, there's much ye can do with it," said Dame Angharad.  "Tis made for ye to enjoy in many ways; 'tis a marvellous toy."

"Toy!" cried Hermione.  "Gods, I can use it as a Quidditch bat!"

"An interestin' idea, but ye'd have to detach it from himself first."

The druid rose.  "Tis time for ye to sleep now, love."  She smiled.  "Pleasant dreams." She snapped her fingers to extinguish Hermione's candle, and left the room, closing the door softly behind her.

The owner of the great wand, now lying flaccid and diminished against his thigh, was trying to read and not having much success.

_I shall go mad from these dreams,_ he thought.  _This was one of the worst. Coitus interruptus: it sounds like the most dreadful curse one can inflict or suffer, and it is._

_And that rotten little thing, of all the females in the world!  I can't bear inexperienced women.  They are too much trouble for too little result: work on them for hours to get a hiccup and twitch out of them; endure their false-modest squeals when they're asked to return the favour!_

He was not in the habit of deluding himself.  Hermione Granger was not the usual inexperienced woman.  She had a mind of her own, and she knew what she wanted.  He had finally unwrapped the sheet and as he looked down at her lovely body, she had reached for him with knowing hands, gentle and steady, to draw him close.  His eager manhood strained towards the wet pink rose she offered him. Then, they were flung backwards into the Potion Masters' Conference.

_Damn.  I should have liked to enter her slowly, then draw out and place my lips on her stomach and move them down slowly…_the limp soldier started to pay attention and began to throb. He took it in his hand. _No, he would not do it himself, dammit._  

He rose and threw on a long, full robe, an antique wizard's garment, left his dungeon, ducked through the Floo and came out next to Hermione Granger's bedroom.  _What am I doing?  Am I mad?_

He stood staring at her door. It opened, and he walked into the room.  The door closed silently behind him.  Hermione Granger was sitting up in her bed.  She held out her arms:  "Where were we?"

He walked slowly over to the side of her bed and stood still.  Hermione untied the belt of his robe and opened it.  She looked up into his bottomless black gaze, then looked down the long pale length of him and curled her tongue over the centre of her upper lip.

Snape closed his eyes, his breath catching raggedly in his throat. She looked up at him, mischief in her glance.  "What a marvellous toy," she said.  "May I play with it?"


	11. Chapter 11 Teacher adn Student

**_Chapter 11. What Have Ye Learned_**

Snape froze.  His hands dropped to his sides.  His voice poisoned velvet, he enunciated precisely:  "I beg your pardon.  I mistook you for a _woman."_  His lips curled in an all-too-familiar sneer.  He loomed over her, his rage suddenly cresting and breaking:  "How _dare_ you speak to me as if I were one of your idiot Gryffindor chums!Toy!  A _toy,_ you say!"  He snatched his robe closed, whirled on his heel and strode out of the room, slamming the door behind him.  Hermione could hear the _whoosh_ of the Floo in the hall fireplace, then all was quiet. 

Hermione sat, stunned.  _Oh, gods, I've stuffed my foot into my mouth, haven't I? Now he's insulted, furious at me.  He's right.  I didn't act like a woman, I acted like a child.  _She subsided onto her pillows and leaned her head against the long-suffering Crookshanks.  "I was wrong, Crook.  I didn't stop to think about his feelings, he's so different from me and – and so_ vulnerable_.  And the pity is, I really wanted him." 

She considered.  What did it mean, _"I really wanted him?"_ As what?  She had informed him that she wanted him as a _plaything_.  _Well_, she thought, _isn't that part of the relationship, the ability to be playful?  Must it always be deadly serious?_  For the past seven years, Severus Snape had been a central part of her life. He had gradually, painstakingly brought her to the point where they worked together as colleagues.  As her skill increased, he challenged her increasingly; as her capabilities grew, he entrusted her with responsibility.  He encouraged he to think independently, to question, to evaluate, to apply logic and to observe.  He insisted that she develop precision and thoroughness.  If his praise was faint and seldom, it didn't matter:  his way of praising her was to present her with new opportunities.

When had she first realised that he was more than just a teacher to her?  It was long before the harpsichord incident, as she called it. It was the end of her second year, and she had already distinguished herself in Potions.  She was wrestling with a knotty problem:  Snape had assigned her to a special project.  She was growing increasingly frustrated, and was at the point of turning her cauldron of recalcitrant clots that refused to dissolve into a turnip and hurling it out of the window.  She took a deep breath, straightened her back.  _What would Professor Snape do?_

She drew herself up to her full five feet three inches, linked her hands behind her back and fixed the cauldron's contents with a steely eye.  She saw _into_ the stubborn clots of herbs, lacewings, fungi and reagents, and ordered the tangled molecules to line up _or you will be swine slop_. She meant it.  The clots immediately dissolved, the potion began to boil slowly, and rainbow swirls of colour appeared in its depths.  _Cor, _she thought, _I did it.  I commanded it to work and it did.  _

She was aware of a presence at her side.  The Potions Master looked into the cauldron.  Then he looked at her with his fathomless black eyes and nodded once. For him, that was the equivalent of shouting out, "Well done!" and applauding her.

Another time, she had been stirring a cauldron for hours at a precise rate of speed and number of revolutions per minute.  She was exhausted; the muscles of her arm had gone from burning to trembling to numbness to a profound ache that had spread to her back, shoulders, neck and now her head.  She was sweating, and had begun to feel nauseated.  Snape stood behind her, put his hand under her arm and so smoothly that she hardly knew it happened, he took the wand from her hand and continued stirring.  He put his other arm around her waist.  "Lean on me until the weakness passes," he murmured, and she clung to him.  Her strength returned, and she looked up at his face in profile, intent upon the potion.

"Look," he said.  "It's completed."  Surely enough, the potion had resolved itself into a clear liquid with iridescent streaks. 

"I've failed," she said, stepping back.  "If you hadn't helped me, it would have been ruined."

He glared at her.  "Never think that you can do everything yourself, Miss Granger," he snapped.  "You knew that this potion had to be stirred for hours; you might have asked for someone to relieve you before you came close to fainting and ruining your work.  You might have asked _me_ to help you, you know."  And he stalked off.

She had thought long and hard about that encounter.  Come to think of it, there were many times during the past five years when Snape had been kind to her, in his way.  When she had been injured in a battle with the Death Eaters, he had sat by her bed in the hospital wing, patiently feeding her medicine, drop by drop, putting cold compresses on her forehead, checking her pulse with his sensitive fingers, turning her and propping her with pillows to take pressure off her wounded arm and side.

Voldemort killed her parents.  She had made it through the funeral arrangements, the memorial services, and the burial in a strange kind of fog, her friends inseparably at her side, McGonagall and Dumbledore hovering nearby.  Yet it had been Snape who had known somehow that the next night, in the hours before dawn, unable to sleep, she had gone to walk the balcony around Gryffindor tower, feeling as if her heart had been torn out of her chest as her parents' had been, feeling as if six feet of black earth had been shovelled over her, considering spreading her arms and falling off the edge of the tower, to fly or to perish.  

The door to the balcony opened, and in a swirl of black cloak, Snape put his arm about her shoulder and the other under her knees, lifted her and carried her to her rooms and sat down in her armchair.  He pulled his cloak over her and held her in his lap. Almost imperceptibly, he rocked her, holding her against his chest, until she began to weep, and he let her grieve until she cried herself to sleep.

More recently, she, Ron and Harry had returned, slightly in the bag, from an unauthorised trip to Hogsmeade.  What was worse, they had taken Ron's family's enchanted motorcar, which had been caught (for the second time) by the Whomping Willow and now lay on its side, boot open, doors sprung, as Hagrid and a couple of his brawny troll pals tried to right it.

They had come up the staircase to Gryffindor wing and turned the corner, and there he was, in a right fury, hands on hips, glowering at them.  He pointed one long arm at a staircase, and in his most velvety voice, said, "Potter, Weasley, Granger, three hundred points EACH from Gryffindor.  Get your disgusting selves up to Madam Pomfrey and get sober.  Consider yourselves fortunate:  you would not like _my_ detoxification methods. Detention for the next three weeks."  They ran.

Some hours later, Hermione was on her way to her rooms when Snape seemingly stepped out of nowhere, affrighting her.  He stood squarely in her path, and she stopped in front of him, her heart pounding.  "You stupid little girl!" he hissed.  "Larking about in a dangerous vehicle with your two moron pals was not enough: you had to get _drunk! And then drive that vehicle!  _He started to go, then turned.  Sadness mixed with disappointment, he said, "I had thought you were better than that."

She stood in the corridor, feeling her heart break.  And so it had gone, for five years:  he reached out tentatively to her, she retreated.  She reached out to him, he recoiled.  And yet they could not stay away from each other.  Hospitalised and close to death, Snape fought to survive a Cruciatus curse, and Hermione sat beside his bed, as he had sat beside hers, refusing to allow him to slip away.  She brought his Muggle radio from his rooms and commanded it to play the music he preferred; she prepared a salve that combined ancient herbal lore with particle physics to heal the seared nerve endings in his hands; she read him poetry by Dylan Thomas, Rumi, Walt Whitman, Rilke.  She lit incense of sandalwood and lavender beside his bed.  When he began to respond, she bullied him into drinking first tea and then soup, and badgered him until he ate a light meal.  When he began to snap at her, she smiled, cocked a snook at him and left him to the ministrations of the Hospital staff.  His first act on returning to duty was to levy Detention on her for disrespectful behaviour. 

_Yes,_ she thought, _we've been colleague, parent and child to each other, and were ready to be lovers.  What should I have done?_

He had opened the door to her room and strode in, wearing an old-fashioned wizard's robe, black velvet, and apparently nothing else:  she could see his white-skinned chest in the V neck of the robe.  He walked slowly over to her bedside.

_I should have taken his hand and asked him to sit down:  _"Please sit down. To what do I owe the honour of your presence?"_  I would then lean back, allowing my nightdress to reveal one shoulder, and smile seductively. _ _Ugh, _she thought.  _Just like a Muggle bodice-ripper: _

No, he would have been as grossly insulted.  That was _tacky_.  Or, perhaps, a more circumspect approach: "Professor, I'm glad you came here.  I can't sleep and would appreciate your company. I shall dress and return momentarily."  _No,_ she said to herself, _the man comes into my bedroom wearing a robe with nothing underneath, and I offer to dress and engage him in conversation?_

A small voice in her head said, _you held out your arms and said, _"Where were we?_" You should have shut your gob after that. _

She thought briefly about going to his rooms and apologising.  With her luck, Filch would catch her and there would be Hades to pay.  _I could owl him, and write a contrite letter_.  In his present mood, she realised, Snape would be likely to shred the letter with his fingernails and strangle the owl that brought it.  She considered a howler: could one do it without the load of anger that made howlers work?  Then again, howlers had minds (of a sort) of their own, and sought their targets in conspicuous public places for the greatest embarrassment value. 

She turned over on her stomach, and Crookshanks paraded onto her back, where he proceeded to lie down, his tail swishing back and forth, and purr loudly.  A damp nose pressed briefly onto her neck, a velvet paw patted her shoulder, and Hermione began to weep, holding to her pillow, wishing with all her heart it were the long body of the Potions Master. 

In his chamber, Severus Snape downed a Dreamless Sleep potion with a brandy chaser.  He was hurt beyond repair, disgraced and dishonoured.  _What a fool I am,_ he chided himself.  _I believed her when she described the complex and mature relationship we seemed to have developed. I should have known better. Why in the name of the nine Hells would she want _me _for a lover? Aside from getting off, scratching an itch, as it were?  Or maybe (_he cringed at the thought_) she's made some obscene wager with her moronic housemates:  _"I shagged the Potions Master!"_ Equivalent, _he thought with disgust, _to saying, _"I swallowed six goldfish!"

The potion took hold, and he turned over on his stomach, holding to his pillow, wishing with all his heart that it were the soft body of Hermione Granger, as sleep claimed him.

***

  


 She stood in the middle of Slytherin hall, small and brave and determined in her slightly-too-big robes, her hair curling down her back, her hands clasped in front of her.  He could walk around her, but he would have to look directly at her to do that.  Head up, gaze far away, he strode down the corridor.

Hermione Granger stepped into his path.  "Professor Snape," said she, "I want to say something to you.  It will only take a moment.  Please let me say it all of a piece."

Something stopped him in his tracks.  He stood still, refusing to look at her.  He could hear her draw a long breath.

'Professor Snape, I have wronged you.  I made an assumption I had no business making, and thereby offended you.  For that I apologise.  For the way that I feel, I don't need to make apologies.  I think that we have made a connection that is worthy of being preserved.  I believed that we were ready to have our relationship grow.  If I believed incorrectly, I apologise.  I have been your student and your colleague, and if that is all I can ever be, please allow me to continue."  She took two small steps towards him, and lowered her voice almost to the point of a whisper. 

'I've always accepted you exactly as you are, and never asked you to change.  Nor will I.  You are what you are, and no-one wants to be asked to make themselves different." 

She stopped, took another long breath, and spoke again:  "I've told you how I feel.  That will never change."  She lifted her chin, and looked him in the eyes.  "I know that I love you. I will only know you love me if you tell me so.  I'll make no assumptions." 

Snape stood absolutely still.  His face was stricken; she thought that he might weep.  Quickly, she walked over to him, linked her hand through his arm and walked him towards the moving staircases.  He stopped at the door to the gardens.  "Let's go outside," he said, his voice barely audible and quite unlike his usual black velvet. 

They walked past the hedgerows and herb borders, the rosebushes and beds of lettuces and cutting flowers, the tidy plots of medicinals.  Snape stopped to pluck pink and white wild roses.  He sat down on a bench, and when she sat next to him, he offered her the flowers.  She took them, and held them to her nose, inhaling the sweet, spicy fragrance.  Without warning, tears began to fall from her eyes onto the flowers. 

"I had always wanted wild roses for my bouquet when I married," she said.  She looked up at him.  "I will marry no-one if I can't marry you, and I will love no-one if you don't love me." 

Snape looked as if someone had hit him, hard.   "What?" he said stupidly.  "What?" Tears overflowed his eyes and ran down his lean cheeks.

"Oh, gods, I've done it again!"  Hermione put her arms around him and cried into his jacket shoulder.  "I mean it!  I want only you!"  She sat up straight, and put him back, wiping her eyes with her sleeve.  "Sit up, Severus!  Look me in the eye!"  He did so, and she saw again the vulnerability that had caught her heart when she played the_ Barcarole_:  She took  her full sleeve in her hand and reached up to wipe his face. 

"Gods, woman, that's awful.  Haven't you a handkerchief?"  He rummaged in the pockets of his jacket and took out a large linen handkerchief with his initial in black, and proceeded to dry her eyes and her face.  She took it from him and dried his eyes and face as well, and then she thrust the handkerchief into her sleeve, took his face in her hands and kissed him soundly.  His lips were trembling; he returned her kiss and then some. 

"I don't want to have to change. I've been through several of the nine Hells trying to honour the Mother, who has put me through torments you can't even _imagine,_ and at the bottom of it, I don't want to have to be different than I am.  Although, I must admit, I lack tolerance and may need some instructions in considering others.  Knowing that, do you still say you love me?" 

"Yes.  I've got much room for improvement, but at bottom, I want to be myself.  Really, I doubt that the Mother wants you to change," Hermione said, leaning against his shoulder.  "Can you tell me about it?" 

"I suppose I might as well, although I cannot say how I might react if you find my misery amusing," he said stiffly. 

"I promise you, I will be tactful."  She smiled at him.  "Love does that, Severus." 

"What does it do?  Pray tell me, although I have a feeling I will get yet another lecture." 

"Love considers the other's feelings.  Now, who lectured you?  Interesting that you, the lecturer, should be taught!" 

"I've had some - lessons_—_" He looked so woebegone, she took his hand in hers, smoothing the rough skin where caustics had burned him, tracing the long finger bones, turning his hand over to see the wizarding palm with its many deep lines. "Well, madam gypsy, are you going to tell my fortune?" 

"The first thing I see is that you will look into my eyes and promise me that you will never hold anything back from me, even if it is dreadful, or stupid, or—or embarrassing." 

Snape stood up, tucked her arm through his, and together they walked through the apple orchard.  A venerable tree extended a bough laden with fruit down to them, a barky grimace that passed for a smile on his trunk.  Snape plucked two of the small yellow and red apples, thanked the tree and they walked on.  Apple blossom petals rained down on them.  He stood still, facing her.  With the hand not holding an apple, he brushed her heavy hair off her forehead.  "I've loved you for years," he said.  "I didn't know what to call it.  What do you call a mixed feeling of awe, attraction, fear, respect, trepidation, physical hunger and tenderness?" 

Her eyes shone.  "You call it love," she said simply.  She bit into her apple; juice spurted.  "Mmm," she said. "Sweet.  I would never have thought it, Severus, but you have a sweetness to you."

He looked at her as if she were crazy.  "Sweet?  You're delusional.  I've been called many things in my life, but _sweet?_  Sour I could understand, bitter I could understand –"

She interrupted him.  "Sweet, when you kiss me," she said, "sweet, when you put your arms around me; when I look under the glamour you so painstakingly maintain."

He shook his head.  "I'm at a loss for words."

"You?  Never."

"Shall I tell you what I despaired of ever knowing?  The sweetness, if you will, of companionship; of sharing my life, of walking towards the inevitable sunset knowing I had loved, and that I had been loved."   He wiped his eyes with his handkerchief.  "This must sound maudlin to you, but you asked me to never hold back from telling you my thoughts.  Can you deal with soggy old Severus, as I seem to have become?" 

"Deal with you I shall," she said.  "You know I'm not afraid of you, and I will have you to rights when I must."

He stopped and looked down at her, brows beetled.  "Are _you_ a druid as well?"

"No, I'm not, but I do honour the Mother.  All women do."

"Bloody conspiracy."

Hermione smirked and squeezed his arm.  "It's for your own good, you know."

"I shall have _you_ to rights, my dear.  You'll not get away with your customary twaddle with me."

Hermione blushed crimson.  "I owe you an apology.  I was afraid to owl you with it for fear you would kill the owl; I thought of sending you a howler, but they're too embarrassing."

"So you stood in the middle of Slytherin corridor and waited until I put in an appearance, so you could confront me directly."

"Exactly.  I do wish to apologise to you for being infantile and insulting your sensibilities."

They walked along the path that led back to the castle.  Snape stopped and put his hands on her shoulders, turning her to face him.

"You have much to learn, but then, so do I."  His low voice, black velvet, sent chills up her spine. "And…. I think that a lesson in anatomy might prove interesting."  Arm in arm, they walked through the double doors of Hogwarts into the Great Hall.


	12. Chapter 12 I Call Him Archibald

Author's Note:  Thanks and praise to that most excellent of beta readers, Ozratbag2, whose knowledge of things medical, romantic, psychological and literary helped me to produce this difficult chapter, and whose understanding of what the reader needs to experience is incredible.  Brava!  Galleons! - DN

Chapter 12:  "I Call Him Archibald" 

Snape looked around at his bedchamber.  House elves kept it clean; he kept it Spartanly tidy.  A wardrobe, a straight-backed chair, a cupboard, and his large four-poster bed with a small table next to it were all the furnishings he allowed himself.  He drew back the bed's dark green silk curtains, rolled back the black tapestry counterpane, and turned down the sides of the black velvet-covered comforter.  The black satin sheets shone.  He rearranged the many pillows, and then put fresh candles into the candelabrum on the bedside table. 

All in all, he observed, not very seductive: menacing, if anything.  Perhaps if he opened the window…he drew back the curtains and flung back both panes.  Moonlight flooded in, and the lilting song of a nightingale.  _That's a little better._  He pointed his finger at his cold hearth:  _Fulgens,_ and a crackling fire blazed, the candles glowed.  _Still better.___

He looked at his pendulum clock:  she would be here any minute.  

_What should I do? _Severus wondered to himself. _ I know how_ she_ feels when she's making love, assuming that that's what I was supposed to learn from the Druid.  What do I do to make her feel like that?  How can I give her so much pleasure that she will come to me, seek me out?  Why must the man always be the initiator? _

He put his long legs up and propped his feet on his desk, balancing on the end of his spine, slouched down in his desk chair.  He steepled his fingers and racked his brains, trying to recall the dream in which Brigit McDiarmaidh had taught him a proper lesson.  

_She boxed my ear!  She tore off my clothing and dragged off my breeches with her teeth; she tossed me around as if I weighed nothing and bullied me to her will._  

He could remember her kiss, soft and gentle, nothing like the rough treatment she subjected him to otherwise.  

_I suppose she could have manacled me to the bedstead, beaten me with a whip, tormented me by chewing on various body parts until I was bloody_.  He recalled that he himself had done these very things to helpless women, and worse_._  His head ached.

During his years as a loyal Death Eater, he had used many poor creatures in the most bestial way. Those whose necks he had wrung or otherwise put out of their misery were fortunate.  There was no crime too heinous, no revel too degraded for him to participate in with fervour, as he sought to steep himself in the Dark Lord's sump of evil.  He had thought he had successfully subdued his humanity enough to dispense with compassion, to be able to accept humiliation and punishment as his due.  Yet it was that very humanity that had, at the end, sent him to Azkaban and from there to Albus Dumbledore, to become a double agent against Voldemort.

With shame, he remembered the hideous last act of cruelty and his own depraved reaction to it that had sent him over the edge.  He visualised the unholy team of himself and Lucius Malfoy, courting Voldemort's favour by jointly raping a young victim, he lying on his back with the maiden impaled on his straining prod, and Lucius pushing her over onto his chest and violating her back passage at the same time. The sensation of the other man's rapid thrusts separated from his own by only a thin membrane had driven him to frenzy, and he had torn at the girl's tender neck with his teeth.  Then he felt Lucius' thin hard hands clutching at his sac, squeezing his testicles together, and he climaxed, biting through the jugular vein. The dark blood filled his mouth.  

Bile filled his mouth, and he bolted for his bathroom and retched until he had nothing left in him.  _And this was the body that Hermione craved, this the mouth she kissed?_ _How could she? But she had_. And now she was coming to his rooms, _at his invitation_, for an "anatomy lesson!"  What had he to teach her?  Ruefully, he recalled that Brigit McDiarmaidh had said, "Ye shall know what I know."  She had _not_ said, "Ye shall know what I want ye to know." And he knew pitifully little.  He had meant it when he said to Hermione, "Where do I begin with you?"

_Wait a minute, old man.  You _do _know what to do:  you said to her, "Come and give me a kiss." She did.  That's how you begin.___

It comes from the spirit.  His spirit, his soul, reached out and clasped the spirit and soul of Hermione Granger, and he knew he was safe.  A Muggle philosopher whose name he could not recall, said, "_All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well."_  He washed his face and brushed his teeth.  He commanded his radio to play, and Brahms filled his rooms. 

~*~

Hermione looked in her mirror. 

"You might fluff out your hair a little on the top, dear," said the mirror.  "It gives you such a pretty look."  

She stuck her tongue out at the mirror. "I hate my hair."

"Now, dear, your hair's lovely.  Master Snape _loves_ your hair." 

"He doesn't have to do battle with it every day, as I do," scowled Hermione, trying to get a brush through a particularly badly snarled curl.  She looked as if she had been caught in a tornado, she thought, and finally gave up.  She wetted her hands and patted her unruly mop down a little.

Half the clothes in her wardrobe were on her bed.  _What should she wear?  _"If you ask me, dear, you should wear your holiday robes with the Head Girl emblem, the outfit you wore to the Halloween Ball." 

"I _didn't _ask you," replied Hermione, holding up a long blue dress against herself, and then flinging it back on the bed.

"You didn't let me finish, dear," continued the mirror.  "The formal holiday robes, _over your new silk underclothes."___

Hermione blushed.  Her last trip to Hogsmeade, in the company of Ginny and half the female Weasley family, had resulted in a number of purchases she hoped she wouldn't regret, amongst them a French silk camisole and knickers, pale salmon pink, with heavy ecru lace.  The camisole barely covered her breasts; the knickers were little more than a silk and lace triangle in front, and a thin silk thong in back, held to the front by narrow ruffles on the sides.

"Sexy, aren't they?" said the saleswoman, a blowsy blonde witch with a stupefying bosom barely contained by her green velvet bodice.

"Oh, go on!" cried Ginny.  "They'll be splendid under your uniform, and it'll be a giggle, because no-one will know you're wearing them but you!"

_If she only knew,_ thought Hermione, and bought the set.  She bathed quickly and put on the new garments.  The thong felt strange:  she looked over her shoulder at her image in the mirror.  "Cor! My bum's naked!"

"Oh, it's all the style, dear," said the mirror.  "Isn't it a bit uncomfortable, though?"

"I suppose one gets used to it," answered Hermione.  She put on her elaborate formal robe, and looked in the mirror one last time.  Yes, it was perfect; she was properly dressed for her journey, a voyage of discovery between equals. 

Crookshanks meowed loudly at her from the centre of her bed.

"Wish me luck, Crook," she called, as she shut the door. 

She descended the narrow, curving stairway that led to the dungeons.

_Should I have brought a bottle of wine with me?  No, that's absurd.  A cake?  Even more so._

She was nervous, more nervous than she had been in her entire life.  She passed a portrait of some long-ago Mistress: the portly woman turned to her from the scroll she had been reading, smiled a gap-toothed smile and gave her a double "thumbs-up."  She shivered as she reached the bottom of the stairway and a cold draught blew at her from the tunnel-like corridor. 

_What are you afraid of? The Runes Mistress explained to you that it doesn't have to hurt, didn't she?  _

Why was she thinking about lovemaking as if it were an uncomfortable medical procedure?  She recalled her previous experiences; they were anything but reassuring.  Ron Weasley had been her first boyfriend, and although he kissed her very sweetly, his clumsy hands grabbing her here and there did little to put her in a romantic frame of mind.  Ron had gotten a little more skilful as they grew older, but she felt no answering pulse in her groin when he put his arms around her, no _opening _when he touched her.  Finally, she had had to make it clear to them that they were better off as chums.

Viktor, by comparison, was a man of the world.  He knew that if he ran his thumbnail slowly up her spine she would press against him, her pulse beginning to pound.  He knew where to touch her and elicit shivers and gasps.  But his attempt to possess her had ended in failure: instead of warming and liquefying to his caresses, her body had clamped itself shut before he had even begun to enter her.  Perhaps, she reasoned, she was one of those witches who must remain a maiden, celibate, to concentrate her powers.  But in her dreams, in her fantasies she gave herself repeatedly and unreservedly to a lover who brought her to the edge of the abyss of passion and over; holding her, moving with her until her she detonated into a million little moving points of light around the supernova that was he(a line she thought she remembered from some Muggle bodice-ripper of a romance novel).  _As long as my troth is to a phantom lover, how can a real man take my hand?_

That phantom lover was now and had been, from the time she was fifteen, Severus Snape. She had despaired of ever realizing her fantasies; even before she realised that she loved him, he had been the unreachable object of her passion.  She tried to shut him out, but she could not:  it was as if he was so enmeshed in the fibre of her being that her hands were his hands, her body his body, and many a night she wept, furious at herself and at him, because once again he had carried her to the centre of the universe and hurled her into a pin wheeling nebula, where she revolved in the arms of the galaxies, her vibrations creating worlds.

_No human man could do that, _she thought._ Severus Snape is human, he's not a creature of my imagination, and I can't mould him into my dream image.  Am I doomed to disappointment yet again_?

She caught herself up short:  did she not love the real man?  Nasty temperament, boiling anger, vengeful and arbitrary, cruel and cold, greasy hair and all – did she not love him in spite of his obvious flaws?   Lost in a strange world, cold and frightened, had she not put her arms around him and felt his skin on hers, and she not been ready to give herself _repeatedly and unreservedly_ to the real man?

The door to Snape's chambers was closed.  As she stood in front of it, it opened slowly.  She heard faint music, smelled incense.  She drew herself up, head high.  _He loves you; _she heard the musical voice of the Runes Mistress. Hermione smiled and stepped inside.

Severus Snape was standing in front of his sitting-room hearth.  He held out his hand to her, and when she took it, he realised she was ice-cold.  _We're both terrified,_ he thought.  He led her over to the settee, and they sat down.  She was shivering.

"Well, Miss Granger," he said, looking down at her, "isn't this how we last found ourselves, cold and frightened?"  He was astonished at his own courage.  Her hand tightened on his.

"Yes," she answered.  "Can you please call me Hermione?"

"I can.  This is difficult – Hermione.  We must help one another."

She stared at him, amazed.  "That was brave of you; I've been struggling with the same thought all day.  Thank you for saying it."

He looked down.  "You can't imagine what I've been thinking all day.  I've never had anyone trust me before (well, with the exception of Dumbledore), but you are trusting me with yourself, with your life.  I am not used to feeling humble."  

"Neither am I.  Gryffindors tend to be self-righteous do-gooders, you know."

"I do know indeed." He turned her hand in his, and she touched his face.

She stood up.  "Please, put your arms around me, Severus," she said, and he stood as well, enfolding her in his arms.  She pressed her face into his jacket, which smelt of herbs and chemicals and, faintly, sandalwood and lavender.  "I can't feel you at all through all this thick wool," she said.

"Tactful, aren't you?  As I recall, you commanded me to take off my underclothes."

"I did no such thing!" she cried indignantly.  "I asked you to _please_ take off your underclothes."

"And then made great sport of them withal."

"Did not! Well, they were worthy of it."

"I suspect _yours_ are not worth a fig, if the dismal garments you wore to the Potions Masters' Conference were any indication—"

"You took them off me!"

"Capital idea!"  

She sniggered helplessly.  Gods, he could be funny when he chose to be!  

"Well? Are you going to do it again?

She could have sworn she saw a twinkle in his black eyes.  "I shall be right back."  And he disappeared into his chamber.  

Hermione paced back and forth in front of the fire.  After a few minutes, she grew concerned. 

"Severus?" she called.  "You said you'd be right back."

"In here," his voice came from the other room.  She walked over to the door, which swung open in front of her.  The music was a little louder: there, on a shelf, was a Muggle radio.  Fire blazed in the room's hearth, casting a friendly golden light over the sombre black and dark green furnishings.  Moonlight streamed through the open window.  

_There stood the bed, its curtains drawn.  She could see the flicker of candlelight faintly through the dark green curtains._

"Severus?" 

A long hand reached through the curtains and drew them back.  She gasped.  He lay on the black sheets, uncovered to his waist, his body white as ivory.  "Please come to bed." 

Hermione, her hands shaking, undid her robes, and then took off her shoes and stockings.  She stood before him in her new French silk undergarments.  He held the covers up for her to get in, and took her in his arms.

 "Now," he murmured into her ear, "what delights have you for me?  Frozen feet? Ah, I see: sexy French scanties?"

She ran her hand over his chest and around to his back.  His skin was velvet smooth, with some little hard lines and ridges here and there.  Her heart clenched:  _torture marks._  She put her lips on his collarbone and kissed her way up to his mouth.  

Snape put his hands on her ribs and pulled her camisole off over her head.  He tossed it on the floor, and put his long hands on her shoulders, then drew them down slowly.  He bent his head to her breasts and kissed them gently, first one, then the other.  

"Do you like that?" 

"Oh, yes, more please."  Hermione clasped her arms around his head and held him to her. Then she wriggled downward in his arms and kissed his chest, softly.  She found his small nipple with her tongue, circled it and teased it to attention.  

He gasped  "More," he breathed, and she did more, covering his wet nipple with her palm, finding the other one, and making it wet and erect.  She looked up at him:  "Do it to me?"

"With pleasure," he said, and she cried out, as he drew her nipple between his lips.  The inside of his mouth, as well as his tongue, was warm and wet and soft.  She began to feel his caress elsewhere, to her astonishment, and she told him so:  "I feel your tongue and your lips _here—" _and she guided his hand to the inside of her thigh.

Snape raised his head and looked in her eyes.  "Are you ready for that anatomy lesson I offered you?" he asked.

"I am ready for anything you offer me," she said.  He leaned over and kissed her mouth deliberately, his tongue stroking the inside of her lower lip and then circling her tongue. Gentle fingers strayed amongst her curly pubic hairs, and she shivered.

"Are you ready to make the acquaintance of the Slytherin Snake?" 

"I would like to know more of the slithering tongue first," she said, and he rolled over on his back, taking her with him. She leaned over him, brushing his chest with her breasts, and he put his hands on her waist.  He kissed her chin and neck, slowly, slowly, and she shuddered with pleasure and put her hands in his hair.  _He's washed his hair, it feels like silk._  Her breasts, her ribs, her stomach, he kept moving her upwards, tasting her, until she sat on his chest, and she could feel his heartbeat against her buttocks, his warm breath on her mound.

"Naughty girl, to block my way with these silly little drawers," and with one swift movement, he ripped the French thong panties from her body, threw them away, and brought her pink rose secrets to his mouth.  Hermione screamed, her back arched and she clutched his head in her hands.  _How did I know how to do this?_  He wondered, as she trembled and opened under his touch. 

She did not want him to stop, but he lifted her to rest on her side, and he wrapped her in his arms.  "That was incredible," she whispered to him.

"You shall have more, I promise. Now, do it to me," he murmured.

She raised herself on her elbow and placed her hand on his chest, following the silky black hair with her finger, down to the softness of his white stomach and the black curls…and there, in front of her face, was the marvellous toy, its soft, broad head glistening with lubrication.

She ran her finger around the ridge below the head; the skin was soft and fine.  

 "What is it called?" she whispered. She glanced up at him; he was smiling.

"I call him Archibald, for he has no hair on his head," he purred, and she buried her face in his stomach, her shoulders shaking, not daring to laugh aloud.  "Now, see, he wants to be your friend; give him a kiss."She put her hand around his erect penis, feeling its heat and power, and lowered her head with excruciating slowness, watching Severus' face out of the corner of her eye.  She curled her tongue around the head.  The little smiling slit opened at the touch of her lips, and she tasted a drop of salty-sweet lubrication.  Gently, she took the head into her mouth and sucked upon it; its spongy softness was most agreeable.  She drew a little more into her mouth, beginning to encompass the curved, pulsating shaft with its fascinating veined surface.  She felt Severus' hands in her hair.  She withdrew, and looked at him; his eyes were closed, his head back, and he looked as if he were dreaming.  "Severus?"

"Yes, love, don't stop," he breathed raggedly.

She circled the head with her tongue, took as much of him as she could into her mouth.  Her hands found his soft sac; she felt the two ovals within.  Severus groaned loudly.  "Am I hurting you?"

One of his hands found her leg, and a long finger moved ticklingly along the inside of her thigh.  "No, not hurting me, I love it, more…"

Hermione moved closer to him, and turned him on his side.  He put his hands on her legs, and parted them.  Again, she grasped him in her hand and moved the intriguing loose skin up and down the shaft, gently, at first slowly and then more rapidly, as she teased the head with her tongue.  Severus' hips began to move. "More, more…"

"Greedy, aren't you, " she said. "Well, so am I."

Severus' questing finger found and opened her outer lips, with thumb and forefinger he caught her nub and began to squeeze it rhythmically.  Then he leaned forward and slid his long tongue into her passage.  He found only a slight resistance and pressed past it, as far as his tongue could reach, then he withdrew it and sucked the soft frilled tissues, trembling against his lips. He slipped his finger inside her.  Hermione's hips had begun to move, and unexpectedly, her passage clenched his finger and drew it deeply into herself, her nub pulsated in his mouth and her back arched.  She shrieked, and her hips thrust hard, hard: he felt and tasted a brief gush of hot, salty fluid.  The one hand that was not otherwise busy moved up her body to her breast.  He took her nipple between thumb and forefinger and squeezed it rhythmically, and he felt her orgasm peak, drop and then peak again.  She was ready to receive him.  "Make me wet," he murmured, and she bathed his shaft with her tongue until, from base to tip, it was drenched and shining.

Severus turned her around so that they were face to face.  They kissed, tasting each other on each other's mouths.  Hermione's eyes shone, and she stroked his face. "I am yours," she said, "and you are mine."

Snape positioned himself between her legs.  She guided him into her body, pushing forwards against the softness of the glans and the hardness of the shaft, and he entered her slowly, slowly, until his pelvic bone met hers.  The muscles of her passage clasped him firmly.  He put his hand under her thigh to raise her leg, and she put her hand over his.

"Let me rest a moment," she whispered.  "So full…"

His wand jerked inside her, eager to dance.  He moved his hips in a small circle, eliciting a gasp from her and a responding movement, rubbing her soft tissues against his hardness.  They moved together in the rhythm of their own dance of love, and she put her legs around his waist, encircled him with her arms.  He kissed her lips, her nose, her cheeks.

He was about to erupt, like a volcano:  every muscle in his body quivered, and the pounding in his aching testicles drove him, harder and harder, faster and faster, until he could hold back no longer, and stiffened, groaning, moaning her name, "Hermione!  Hermione!" as he climaxed, cradled in her arms and legs and body, loved and sheltered, and he prayed, in that moment of exaltation:  _thank you, thank you, Mother, I give you this ecstasy as my offering.___

**~*~**

 "You are beautiful," he said.  "I've always thought you beautiful."

'Even when you were ready to murder me?"

"Especially then. But not as you are now."

"Is it different, Severus?  Am I different?"

:"I am.  I never understood what 'lovemaking' meant.  I do now."

She considered, playing with the black hair on his chest.  "This is the first time I've ever really made love.  What I did before was childish groping, it wasn't what I wanted to do."

Severus touched her face, traced his finger around her forehead, her nose, the little cleft of her chin.  "I am humbled," he told her.  "I never dreamed that love would feel like this. You are flesh of my flesh, so mysterious, so familiar…"

Hermione saw the tenderness on his face, the unaccustomed vulnerability, and her eyes filled with tears.  _It was as if he was so enmeshed in the fibre of her being that her hands were his hands, her body his body…_"I loved you before I understood you," she said softly.

 "I love you.  I loved you even when I called you a stupid little girl, and a rotten little thing. I've loved you without knowing that I did, and you'll be smugly pleased to know it's my first time." 

Her eyes danced.  "If I look back over the past seven years, I see that I've loved you for at least five of those years.  I just didn't know what to call it, when you trust someone so wholly that you would give your life for them." 

"You almost did, several times."

"As you did for me."

"We should try to sleep."  She pushed him over on his side, his back to her, put her arm around him, and drew him against her, like a spoon nesting with another spoon.

"Hecate's tits, man, your legs are long."

A snort of laughter, and he twined his long legs with hers. 

***


	13. Chapter 13 The After the First Time Morn...

Chapter 13   The After-The-First-Time Morning**__**

Severus Snape realised that he had not been dreaming.  It was still dark, perhaps four AM, and some hours yet until dawn. This was real. Hermione Granger lay snuggled against his side, her leg over his, her mouth slightly open.  She slept like the child she still was. But she made love like the woman she had obviously become, and he was exhausted. He had resisted sleep, listening to her regular breathing slow as she sank into slumber, unwilling to drift off and to find out that, like his other dreams, this ecstatic night was only a figment of his imagination.

She sighed and curled into his shoulder. _She's probably still sore.  _He murmured a healing charm, put his other arm around her and brushed his lips against her forehead.  Breathing her sweet breath, he slept. 

Hermione buried her face in the pillow.  Her bladder was full, and she knew she had to get up; she slitted her eyes and saw light in the window.  _Not her window._

She started to sit up, but a heavy arm anchored her to the bed.  _I didn't dream it. This is Severus Snape's bedchamber; I'm in his bed – with him… _She turned her head to look at him.  Snape's face was different: he looked peaceful, even the deep scowl line between his brows seemed to have smoothed somewhat, and he was smiling slightly.  She smiled back, and put her nose against his jaw.

"Mmmrhh," he mumbled, pulling her closer.

_Oh, gods, Archibald's awake, the Slytherin Snake has arisen; the marvellous toy is wound up. Bathroom first._

"Severus, love, I have to go to the loo.  Let me up."

He murmured something that sounded like "…damned tiny bladders," and released her, rolling over and cocooning himself in the comforter.

Hermione used the toilet and washed her face and hands. 

_I'm going to be late to class, but how often does one have an after-the-first-time morning?_

Severus passed her on his way to the bathroom.  "Keep the bed warm for me, will you?"

She got back into bed on his side, burying her nose in his warm male smell on the sheets and pillows. She stretched luxuriously.  He returned and climbed into bed with her.  She put her arms around him, and he pillowed his head on her breast, took her hand and put it on his erect penis

. "Tell me, Severus."

"Anything, love."  He put his hand over hers and moved the loose, china-silk skin up and down on the shaft.

_" Does it never let you rest?"_

He laughed.  "We men have this thing that is always in search of a snug harbour, always needing attention.  It has quite a mind of its own."  He ran his hand over her stomach.  "You were rather sore last night, so I applied a healing charm."  He touched a gentle finger to her soft folds.  "How do you feel?"

Hermione kissed his face, his neck, and his ears. "Much better," she whispered, "although I think that I shall have to walk carefully today."

Severus drew her head down to his and kissed her thoroughly.  He pulled the comforter up over them.

They barely made it to class.  The Advanced Transfigurations, which Hermione was auditing, had just begun.  Minerva McGonagall lifted an eyebrow as Hermione, in her formal robes, hurried to her seat and sat down gingerly. _Someone's made a decision, _she thought, and smiled her feline smile.  Had she been in her Animagus form, she would have put her whiskers forward and switched her tail.  To her credit, Hermione paid attention scrupulously.  _Good habits remain in spite of everything,_ thought Minerva.

Snape's Potions Class did not go as smoothly.  He stalked into the room, as usual, but seemed to have an abstracted air, which his class of Ravenclaws immediately noted.  Whispers began:  "What's the matter with Snape?"  "Think he's sick?"  "Maybe we won't get detention."  Their hopes were in vain, Professor Snape pulled himself together and was as relentless as ever.  But there were the whispers…

Somehow the morning passed, and as she left the classroom, Hermione saw Snape heading down the hall towards her, his cloak billowing.  He nodded gravely to her, and together they walked to the Great Hall for luncheon.

Dame Angharad took her seat next to Professor Flitwick, and helped herself to soup, bread and fruit.  Filius Flitwick, trying to decide between a cheese and cucumber sandwich on brown bread or a cold chicken salad, looked up, stared, and then turned to the Runes Mistress: 

 "Dame Angharad, do you see what I see?"

"I see what **_I_**see, Professor, and that is two very happy people."

"Whoever would have thought it?  He looks like a different man."

"Not at all," answered the Druid.  "Himself has always been the same under his cloak of sorrow; he has exchanged it for joy."

**~*~ **

Severus backed out from underneath the laboratory bench, stood up and dusted himself off.  He held a padded package containing rice-paper filters made in China to his exact specifications. 

Hermione turned around from the distilling apparatus she was constructing:  "Oh, good!  You've found them!"

Snape undid the package carefully and handed her one of the pale brown filters.  "Damn Longbottom," he grumped. "I merely asked him to straighten out the shelves under the benches, and he's got everything helter-skelter.  It will take me a week to get it right." 

 He stalked over to a simmering cauldron; bent over it, then poked a ladle in carefully, nodded and regulated the heat.  They worked in companionable silence, as they always had, asking questions and exchanging observations as necessary.  There was a rhythm to their working together, Hermione observed; they knew each other so well that she could pass in back of him as he dissected a salamander and wordlessly hand him a haemostat; he could glance at her at the exact instant that she looked up at him, and with a nod indicate that she should add the pinch of whatever substance she held in her hands, or not add it.

The dinner chimes rang, and Hermione put down her wand, held her hands to the small of her back and stretched.  Two large, strong, warm hands positioned themselves on her back, and Severus rubbed her tight muscles until they loosened.  She leaned back against him.

"Thank you," she smiled, and turned around to put her arms around his waist and look up at him. _How lovely it is to work with him,_ she thought, and told him so.

He put his chin on top of her head.  "I am not good with words," Severus said.  "What I want to say, and forgive me if I stumble, is that you are my fulfilment of pride and accomplishment.  I know I've said that badly, but I hope you know what I mean."  "Also," he continued, "as much as I may have subjected you to my fierce temper and perfectionism over the years, I knew you were strong, so strong that you could take it and use it, and so you have."

Hermione released him and stepped back so she could look at him directly.  "I understand," said she. "Even when you were at your most atrocious, I've had the comfort of knowing that when we worked together, we were of one mind, the best of companions."

"You will reduce me to slobbering tears, and ruin the illusion of the terrifying Potions Master," he said.  "Let us get cleaned up and go down to dinner."

Hermione's eyes filled with tears.  "As you will me, and spoil the persona of the know-it-all Gryffindor," she said, rummaging vainly in the pocket of her robe for a handkerchief.

"By Hermes Trismegistus, I shall turn your sleeve into nettles if you wipe your eyes on it!" he scolded.  "Why do women cry when they are happy?"

Hermione stifled a giggle.  "Very well, I shall not use my sleeve as a handkerchief."  She paused.  "I shall use _yours."   _In the face of his outraged splutters, she seized the full sleeve of his robe, wiped her eyes and prepared to blow her nose, watching him out of the corner of her eye.

He levelled his most intimidating glare on her.  "How dare—"

"Peace!" cried she.  "I was only teasing!"  She passed her hand over his sleeve and the tears dried, as well as some potions splatters that had landed there earlier.

Severus looked at her, flabbergasted.  "You did it," he whispered. _ "Without your wand. _Is there no end to the surprises you have in store for me?"

"Well, you have surprised me time and time again," she countered.  "I have had the most excellent of teachers, you know."

With that, they summoned the house-elves to clean up the laboratory. 


	14. Chapter 14 Plaques and Tangles

Chapter 14:  Plaques and Tangles

"The documentation is ready to go to St. Mungo's for clinical trials," said Hermione.  "There's a Doctor Cammarata there who's done a huge body of research on chronic diseases, and he's waiting to proceed."  Hermione had been working on a method of identifying chronic diseases in patients before they actually presented with the symptoms.  She had found a subtle chemical marker in the blood of people whose parents had been afflicted with heart disease.

Severus rolled up a parchment and tied it with a piece of black silk ribbon.  "I'm looking forward to meeting him," he said. 

 "Then, please come with me Wednesday week."  

"I shall, thank you.  I've been trying to resolve once and for all the images that I saw when I tried the Doors of Perception, you know; when you first brought it to me."

"You mentioned the Pliocene Age.  I should go to the University of Edinburgh to research it."

Snape sat down at his desk and stretched out his legs.

'I'm no longer certain that what I saw was the Pliocene, or any landscape at all."

Hermione came over to him and put her hands on his shoulders.  "Can you describe it?"

"I'll try.  It was surely a jungle; there were twisting, tangled vines everywhere, but the trees – if they were trees at all – seemed to grow at odd angles.  I couldn't see the jungle floor, just these strange trees and the tangled vines.  Oh, and the plates."

_"Plates?"_

"Yes, they were wrapped around the ends of the trees."

"That sounds _even odder.  _Ends, on the trees?"

Snape rummaged around on his desk and found a writing-tablet.  "Here," he said.  "I'm no artist, but perhaps I can try to sketch what I mean."

He took quill in hand and began to draw, and a peculiar, alien scene took shape on the parchment.  Long, tubular "trees" with bulbous growths in the centre and branches that reached out towards the branches of other "trees;" odd "plates" overlying the ends of some of the branches and the central growths; tangles of vines everywhere, twisting around the questing tree branches, wrapped around the central growths.

Hermione shivered.  "I'd like to have Madam Pomfrey look at this," she stated.

Snape shook his head.  "Whatever it is, it's somewhere in my life, either past or future. There's nothing I can do about it.  I think it is related to my time as a Death Eater; it has a sense of menace to it."

"It does that," said Hermione." But if it's an illness, and we're forewarned, we can do something to stop it."

Snape grimaced.  He had seen the insides of enough hospitals and been poked, prodded and otherwise tormented by enough medical practitioners to last his entire life.  Yet, she was right :_I'm more than twenty years her senior._ _How can I be so negligent that I should make her a widow too soon? I cannot bear that she should be alone and grieving._  "I had better keep myself in good health, " he said. 

 Hermione saw the concern in his eyes.  "I would rather have twenty good years with you than forty alone or, worse, with someone who did not love me and whom I didn't love"

. "For you," he said, "I'll do it."

Poppy Pomfrey sat down at her desk and put her head in her hands.  The hospital wing was quiet; most of the patients were asleep for the night, and the staff had mostly gone home or to their quarters in the castle.

Brigit McDiarmaidh passed her door, and looked in.  She knocked lightly on the doorframe, and Poppy beckoned her in.

"Shut the door, Brigit," she said

."Och, Poppy, ye look terrible," said the druid.  "What ails ye?"

"It's not what ails _me_, Brigid," the mediwitch answered.  "I'm helpless to help him, nobody can help him.  Perhaps in forty years, there will be a cure."

Severus and Hermione had come up to her office, their faces serious.  They had explained Severus' experience with the Doors of Perception potion, and he showed her his sketch.

Poppy felt her heart stop.  _I've seen this, in a Muggle medical journal.  It's horrible.  There's no cure._  She composed herself.

"This is not the landscape of some prehistoric time," she said.  "It's a drawing of the elements of the brain."

"Brain!" exclaimed Snape.  "I should have recognised the brain cells- those things I called 'trees,' they're neurons!"

"You didn't recognise them because of the stuff all over them," said Poppy. "There isn't much known about this condition, and I don't think it even has a name.  It was observed during autopsy of the brains of extremely aged Muggle subjects in a geriatric study. Those things -"

She pointed to the plates and the vines – "are called plaques and tangles."

"How aged?"

"Well over ninety years, which is nothing to wizards."

"If it's a Muggle condition, why did I see it? What has it to do with my extreme old age?"

Poppy drew a breath. "I'd say that somewhere in your family background there was a Muggle.  It's so with all of us.  That person may have lived to be very, very old, and died with this condition."

"What are the symptoms?" asked Hermione.

"I don't know – since the condition was discovered during autopsy, we don't know how the subjects fared when they were alive, except that, like most very old Muggles, they were enfeebled, their memories were impaired and they were unable to care for themselves."

Snape pinched the bridge of his nose.  "Well, I see no reason to worry," he stated. "My uncle Mortimer lived to be two hundred and fifty, and spent his last days singing nursery rhymes and playing with blocks.  The house-elves changed his nappies."

They thanked Madam Pomfrey and left the hospital wing.  Hermione put her arm around Severus' waist.

"When you are an old baby, I shall put a bib around your neck, feed you, and change your nappy," she said, "and take you for walkies in a pram."

Snape smirked.  "Will you nurse me?" he murmured in her ear, causing her to blush.

Hermione began to laugh, trying in vain to stifle her giggles.  "I can just see you gumming your porridge, and then choosing some poor sod for target practise with the raisins."

"Poppy, ye can't do anything for him," Brigit said.  "No-one can, not Cammarata at St Mungo's, nor the doctors at Edinburgh, not even the specialists at Mount Sinai in America.  Either he will get this disease, or he will not get it.  If he does he will be very, very old, and it will come to him after a very long life."

"And Hermione?"  

Brigit sat down on the chair next to Poppy's desk.  "She's just beginning," she said.  "Let her place her trust in the Mother, and do as she must.  "'Twill not be easy for her, but she is strong.  Through her, he is beloved of the Mother."

"Amen to that," countered Poppy, and she linked hands with the druid.

**~*~**

Severus and Hermione sat on a bench overlooking the herb garden, enjoying a few more minutes before they returned to their respective classrooms.  

"If becoming old and dotty is your worst fear for the future, Severus, we are fortunate," said Hermione.  

"Yes, it seems that the Doors of Perception augur no worse for me than returning to infancy in my old age.  If you'll put up with me, I'll try to behave. But, Hermione, I must admit that I have had fears that I would not be – erm, _adequate."_

"You _are_ dotty!" Hermione exclaimed.  "How could you -you are everything I ever dreamed of!"  She was gratified to see a smile tug at the corner of his mouth.

"I have had some extremely odd experiences lately," he told her. "It seems that I had fallen out of favour with the Mother, or rather, I had never _been_ in her favour, and she decided that I should be given some lessons in how to please her daughters."

And he proceeded to tell her about his dreams.

They walked slowly back to the castle.  "Well," remarked Hermione, "I believe I owe Dame Angharad more than thanks for teaching me the runes.  It seems I owe Sister Brigit a debt of gratitude, in particular for giving your ears a good boxing as well as having you learn what it is that women feel. Now _that _is astonishing!"

"And you aren't – I mean, you aren't angry that I, erm, --"

"No!  It was a _dream, _Severus! I didn't think you'd be, well, inept, but I must admit I was a little concerned that you might be rather – _rough."  _

"And I was dreading having my ears boxed yet again.  Can you imagine how I felt when you mentioned pulling off my breeches with your teeth?"

Hermione whooped with laughter.  She sank down onto the grass, holding her stomach, until she lay, hiccupping, at his feet.

Snape eyed her with his familiar scorn.

"Have I entertained you sufficiently with my embarrassment?"

  
Hermione took his proffered hand and stood up next to him.  She looked up at him with those wide chocolate brown eyes that never failed to melt his forbidding stare.

"My dearest Severus, I had a mental picture of my trying to remove your breeches with my teeth, and it was _your expression_ whilst I was trying to do it that devastated me.  It was the same look you give Longbottom when he's trying to make excuses for an exploded cauldron."

Snape sighed.  "I suppose I will have to develop a sense of humour, but please do not expect me to tell funny stories or appreciate lame jokes."

"You already have a sense of humour.  I think I bring it out in you."

Severus took her hand, raised it to his lips and kissed her fingers. "You bring many things out in me," he remarked.  "Because of you, I have thrown my usual caution to the winds and find myself embroiled in a passionate affair."

Hermione considered.  "Please don't think that you suddenly overwhelmed with a great burst of masculine sensuality, Severus.  We have fought and snapped at each other for   "Because of you, I have thrown my usual caution to the winds and find myself embroiled in a passionate affair."

Hermione considered.  "Please don't think that you suddenly overwhelmed with a great burst of masculine sensuality, Severus.  We have fought and snapped at each other for years, and if I had not had the feeling of trust that I _could_ do battle with you and not lose your friendship, I could not have allowed myself to succumb to your persuasion.  Although—" she bit her lip – "I should not say persuasion.  Against your usual nature, sir, you were most kind and comforting to me when we were caught in that wrinkle in time."

"So that's what melted your frozen Gryffindor heart," Severus remarked.  "My body heat, indeed."

She laughed.  "No, not your heat, although it was considerable.  It was the argument we had, in bed, that night, that convinced me that you cared greatly for me, even if your way of expressing it was less than tactful."

Severus snorted.  "Indeed, the mistress of the tactless jibe accuses _me_ of having no tact!  Might I remind you, if you please, that it was _yourself _ who…"  and they continued on their way to the castle, squabbling like two old friends. 


	15. Chapter 15 We Only Pass This Way One Ti...

Author's Note: JKR owns the Harry Potter universe and the characters therein.  Anyone you don't recognise is from my imagination.

Thanks as always to my wonderful beta reader, OzRatBag2.  Please read "At Any Moment," her latest fic.  And you thought I torment you with cliffies…

Chapter 15:  We Only Pass This Way One Time

Hermione gathered up her notebooks, closed the laboratory door in back of her, and made her way to Gryffindor Tower.  She yawned into her hand; it seemed she never got enough sleep.  _This is what you dreamt of,_ said the little voice in her head.

Hard work, as always; exercising her developing skills in potions and, at the same time, her facility with research.  The library had always been her favourite place, and although she loved the laboratory for a variety of reasons, at bottom it was as it had always been:  the _learning, the discovery, the new information._  

She thought of her brain as a computer, with capacious storage space and a processor that worked at blinding speed.  The wizarding world might disdain the digital universe, but Hermione was drawn to it as a moth to a flame:  imagine:  everything was made up of the same atoms, when one got down to the basic building blocks:  infinitesimal scraps of electrical vibration, either positive or negative, arranged in a quintillion different ways but all, all the same.  To think that, at the subatomic level, a parsnip was no different than a word spoken by Albus Dumbledore!

She had spent the past year as almost a continuation of her last year as a student, remaining at Hogwarts, attending advanced classes as an auditor and student-teaching, working for her own teaching qualifications.  Certainly, her months as Severus Snape's intern were a continuation of her work with him over seven years.  Even Harry and Ron, her chums throughout her schooling, were still around, Harry thinking of becoming an Auror, Ron, like herself, student teaching.  

Everything was going along quite nicely, until her relationship with Snape changed completely.  Now, she thought to herself, what am I to do?  Do I continue with plans to go to university at Edinburgh and come out as Doctor Granger after four years spent in intense study – and removal from everything and everyone I know?  What then?  Would she do an internship at St Mungo's?  Would she go to the United States, to the Mayo Clinic to do her residency, or would she come back to the Continent, to the Sorbonne, and emerge as a Doctor of Philosophy, to work in pure research?

_And what of Snape?  _They had had a dreamlike night and day together, but Hermione was realist enough to know that the first flush of lovemaking was not necessarily the model for an entire relationship.  Were they to become occasional lovers, as she suspected Minerva McGonagall and Albus Dumbledore were?  One could see clearly the flashes of intimacy between them.  They had not talked at all about "what happens next?"  She knew only that she had discovered a physical connection with Severus far beyond anything she had ever dreamed, so intense, in fact, that it was matched only by their compatibility as colleagues.

Was _that_ to be her future:  to work side by side with Severus Snape?  If so, where?  Would they fall into the McGonagall-Dumbledore mould?  One day Albus would retire, and she suspected that Severus would then become Headmaster.  Was that enough for her?__

Harry caught up with Hermione in the passageway leading to their common room. "Hi!  Wait for me!"  She turned and her face lit with a big smile.

"Harry, where have you been?"  

"Where have I been?  Classes, of course, and Quidditch matches.  Oh, and I guess you didn't get my message – I've been called to the Ministry."

Hermione linked her arm through his.  "No, I didn't get your message, but never mind – you were called to the Ministry?  Have they invited you to become an Auror?"

Harry looked at her seriously.  "I've been considering it.  I could do several things:  I could go on to University, but you know, I'm not that much of a student.  I'd rather be doing something useful, and I do want to be around.  You know," he said meaningfully.

"Yes, I do," Hermione answered.  "Something's afoot.  Darkness isn't vanquished, Harry.  I just don't believe that Voldemort's dead.  I think he's lurking around somewhere.  There are too many unexplained murders in the Muggle world."

"And too many stupid wars, and terrorist attacks," Harry added.  "Just because he's not wreaking havoc in Hogsmeade and thereabouts doesn't mean he's gone.  Although," he said, "I don't fancy getting into another battle with him.  I'm afraid it's inevitable"

They went through the portrait hole, and into Gryffindor common room, then out to the balcony overlooking the lake.  Hermione dumped her books on the floor and sat down on a bench, enjoying the breeze and the late afternoon sunshine.

"What does Ron say?" she asked.

Harry looked at her oddly.  "Haven't you been talking to Ron?"

She looked down at her hands.  "I tried.  He doesn't want to have anything to do with me."

Harry said nothing for a little space of time.  "Hermione – " he began awkwardly,

"It's all right, Harry," she said, reaching over and taking his hand.  "I know Ron's upset about my…my friendship with Severus Snape."

"I was pretty surprised too," Harry answered.  "But I wasn't upset.  You've probably been closer to Snape for the past seven years than anyone's ever been.  There's got to be something you see in him that nobody else can see."

"Yes," Hermione said.  " I know it's going to sound strange, Harry, but we fit.  Our personalities, our values, our thoughts – everything fits.  Severus understands me.  He gives me room – he knows I need to study, to pursue knowledge, and he knows I need to be by myself sometimes.  He's the same way.  He doesn't crowd me."

Harry thought for a moment.  "I grant you that I don't understand him.  I know he's brilliant, and I know he'll do anything for Hogwarts, for Headmaster Dumbledore and for me.  It's just that he's been, well, the – the miserable git for so long, it's hard to visualise him as anything else.  But if you tell me that he's respectful of you, I can handle it."   He swallowed.  "You're my best friend, and you deserve all the love in the world.  You haven't mentioned love once, Hermione."

She squeezed his hand.  "You'll find this hard to believe, Harry, but I've loved him for at least five years, and he's admitted that he has loved me for longer than that.  His life has had so little love in it, that he didn't recognise it for the longest time.  But as soon as he did, he told me.  He tells me all the time.  He tells me everything."

"Wow," Harry said.  "I think you're the first real friend he's ever had."  He looked at her in all seriousness.  "So, what will you do?  Are you going to marry him?"

Hermione bit her lip.  "We haven't talked about marriage in so many words," she said. "We talk about being together, and we've talked about the future, even about when we grow old –" she smiled inwardly, remembering their conversation about extreme age – "but he hasn't proposed to me."

"Well," Harry said, drawing himself up, "he has to declare his intentions.  Now, you know I'm open-minded –" He turned bright red.

"Oh, Harry!  Great Grendel's ghost, I'm of age – over legal age, certainly, and yes, we do have a very fulfilling relationship – " here, Hermione blushed herself – "but I'm sure his intentions are honourable."

"Well, as your best friend, and since you don't have any brothers, and (here he put his arm round her shoulders), as one who considers himself your family, I shall ask him what his intentions are."

Hermione leaned her head against his.  "Harry, that's embarrassing."

"Well, he has to know that I'm concerned about your welfare, and he'll just have to deal with it."

He looked at her, his dearest chum, as close as Ron.  "Do you want to marry him? "

Two deep dimples pocketed her cheeks and she bumped her nose into Harry's.  She lowered her voice:  "Yes, I do, and Severus will have to know that I bring with me my best friends in the world, as well as my Gryffindor bossiness and my know-it-all superiority."

Harry wiped his eyes on his sleeve and hugged her hard.  "Now we need to get Ron together," he said.

*~*

Minerva McGonagall looked hopelessly at the pile of correspondence on her desk.  She shook her head.  "Owls, owls, owls! I'm plagued with 'em!  No sooner do I finish with one pile of letters and memoranda, than they're at me again!"

She opened the last of the last batch of envelopes.  It was large and heavy, thick creamy linen paper, addressed to _Mme. Minerva McGonagall, Ecole Hogwarts._  She withdrew the letter, shook her head.  Her French wasn't what it used to be, and she muttered a Translation charm.  Slowly, she read the letter.  Then, she folded it and put it carefully into its envelope.

She sat for a moment, considering.  Then, she left her office, closing the door behind her, and walked deliberately to Dumbledore's suite.  "Jaffa Cakes," she said, and the gryphon revolved.

*~*

There was a brisk knock on her door. "Enter," called Hermione.  Severus Snape stood in her doorway

"Come in," she said. "Why are you standing there like that?"

A familiar smirk appeared on the Potions Master's visage.  "Do you know, I've never been in your chambers, my lady?"

"I beg to differ," she said crisply.  She walked over to the door and put her hand on his arm.  "One awful night you prevented me from jumping from Gryffindor Tower, and you carried me right in here, and sat with me in that very chair – " she indicated her squashy armchair, now occupied by Crookshanks – "and held me all night."

Severus took her hand.  "Yes," he said.  "I remember.  You tore my heart out that night, and have been playing Quidditch with it ever since."

Hermione laughed.  "As you had no heart of your own at that time, I was generous enough to let you keep mine."

"That's a rather Victorian sentiment.  Been reading bodice-rippers, have you?"

As they approached the Great Hall, they joined the steady stream of students and Masters going in to dinner.  Hermione noticed Ron Weasley heading for the Gryffindor table.  "Ron!" she called.

He turned around, saw her, put his head down and continued to walk.  "Please go and sit down," she said to Snape. "I'll join you in a moment."  She walked quickly and caught up with Ron.

"Please, Ron, don't turn away.  I want to talk to you," she said, catching his arm.

Ron looked straight ahead.  "There's nothing to say," he muttered.


	16. Chapter 16 We Won't Forget

Chapter 16:  We Won't Forget 

"Ron, don't turn away from me.  Please."  Hermione caught hold of his sleeve, and he stood still.  He looked at the ground.

Hermione put her hand on his shoulder.  With dismay, she felt him shrink from her touch.  That was painful; for seven years, Ron had been the one to grab her into an impromptu hug, the one to toss her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes; to initiate a rowdy tickle session.  He was used to physical contact with his large, uninhibited family, and it was Ron's shoulder she leaned on for comfort, Ron she sat back to back with by the lake; Ron's hand that clasped and swung hers as they walked.  

"Ron, please look at me."  Slowly, he raised his head and turned around.  His blue eyes held a world of pain, of rejection.  "I have to talk to you, to tell you how –"

 Ron's face was twisted into a mask of disgust and misery.  "I don't _want_ to know," he said.  Then, he seemed to change his mind:  "I could take it, when I realised that we weren't going to be close in _that way_.  It hurt, but you were still my best friend, my closest –" he choked, and tears began to roll down his freckled cheeks.

Hermione seized his hand and dragged him into the small parlour next to the Great Hall; it was sometimes called the Tea Parlour.  She pulled him over to a small settee by the fireplace, and none too soon; her eyes exploded with tears.  For some time, they sat there miserably, weeping next to each other.

Ron wiped his sleeve across his eyes.  "_How could you?"_

Hermione fished in her sleeve for her handkerchief; it was not even hers.  It was one of Severus' with his initials in black, and she thrust it back where it had been.  She wiped her face with the heels of her hands.  "Ron, I _have_ to tell you, so you understand, _please…"_

He sat still.  Then, he reached out his arms, and in the next second she was hugging him, a storm of tears wetting his robes.  A gentle hand put her hair back from her face.  "Cor, girl, you're a fright," he said softly.

Hermione sat up, holding on to his hands.  "You say things like that to me all the time," she said.  

"Sure I do!  I _see you_, you're my best friend, and it ain't always pretty and perfect, is it?  I can tell you _anything. _  It's for your own good," he said stoutly.

"Well, then," said she, "you must know that you're not the only one who can look at me and tell me I'm a fright, or that I'm doing something stupid, or that I'm wrong, and _mean it with love."_

"Well, he had better not insult you in public!" Ron cried, then caught himself up short.  "We insult each other in public all the time, you and me and Harry, don't we?"

Hermione bit her lip to keep from smiling.  "Yes, we do.  Only people who really love each other can fight and squabble and say daft things to each other – and mean it with love."

Ron looked earnestly into her face.  "Are you serious?  _Snape_ says daft things to you _with love? _ Cor," he muttered.  "This I have to hear."

"Well, " she answered with asperity, "borrow Harry's Invisibility Cloak some time, and come sneaking round!  No, I don't really mean that, Ron.  Yes, he does speak to me with love – and with courtesy, and he _listens_ to me.  Really listens."

"I can see the lot of you twenty years from now, still stirring cauldrons, still skulking round the dungeons.  You'll probably take to wearing black and letting your hair get all greasy – " Ron shuddered.

"No.  _I _can see us twenty years from now,  working on private research projects and getting paid _heaps_ of galleons _and_ pounds when we develop cures for diseases that kill wizards and Muggles as well, and spending weekends and holidays at Snape Manor in Scotland – and probably entertaining you and Harry and your wives along with your broods of teenaged prats!"

Ron snorted.  "You're kidding me," he said.  "Snape Manor?  What is it, a haunted house on the moors? And you and him, and- and- " he looked at her as if he were ready to burst into tears again.

Hermione put her hand on his arm.  "We haven't talked about children," she said.  "We haven't even talked about getting married.  But if ever I marry anyone, it will be him." She took a big breath.  "Our spirits fit, Ron.  I hope that you find a woman whose spirit fits yours, then you'll understand." 

Ron stood up and pulled her up with him.  "You're sure?" he said.   He drew himself up and shook his robes all round, like a rooster fluffing his feathers.  He took her face in his hands.  "Hermione," he said quietly,  "I still think he's a greasy git, and my stomach turns when I think –" he shook his head, hard.  "But if he makes you happy, I'll – I'll even shake hands with him."  Unconsciously, he wiped his hand against his robes.  "And if you marry him, I'll stand up with you, me and Harry together."

They stood looking at each other, and then they hugged long and hard.

*~*

It was only with great difficulty that Albus Dumbledore, that most well meaning of busybodies, restrained himself from bellowing, "And how is our loving couple this evening?" when Hermione and Severus sat down at the Masters' Table.  Hermione, although a graduate student, was not yet a Mistress, and so she sat in a guest's chair, with a low back.  The usual chatter went back and forth as usual as dinner appeared on the tables.  Headmaster Dumbledore noticed that the lovers sat side by side, with great dignity, talking to others around them as well as between themselves.  

"Good manners will out," remarked Minerva.  "They look so sweet together, don't you think?"

"I hardly think 'sweet' is the right description for Severus, but I've never seen him look this relaxed," answered Dumbledore.  "It's about time."

At the Gryffindor table, Ron was bursting to talk to Harry privately.  He looked over to the couple at the Masters' table; cool as cucumbers they were.  Harry saw where his friend's gaze locked.

"Hermione was looking for you earlier, " Harry said.  "Did she find you?  Did you two have a chat?"

Ron could hardly restrain himself.  "Oh, so she had her little "chat" with you first, did she? I knew it," he said sourly, "She rehearsed it with you, because she knew I was so put out with her."

Harry shrugged.  "It's going to take some getting accustomed to," he said ruefully.  "To tell the truth, he's being rather polite. Still, I got detention for sneezing over my cauldron in class last week, so he hasn't changed that much," he stated.  "But he does look better than usual, doesn't he?  He's not as green and greasy-looking. Maybe she's put a glamour on him to improve his appearance."

They were interrupted by Ginny, who bounced out of her chair and squeezed herself in between them.  "Have you _seen_ Hermione?" she chortled.  "She can hardly walk! One doesn't get that way from casting charms or working in the laboratory.  Do you know, when a woman—"

"Stop it!" yelled Harry and Ron together. "You," said her brother, "are turning into a right prat of a gossip and busybody.  Don't you have anything more interesting to watch?"

Ginny stuck out her lower lip.  "You know _exactly_ what I'm talking about," she said smugly.  Ron and Harry looked at each other and nodded.  Ron brought up his wand and said firmly, "_Silentio boca."  _Ginny's mouth continued to move, but no sound came out.  Her round blue eyes goggled, and then filled up with tears.  "Sorry, love," smirked Ron.  "Can't hear a word you say.  Can we, Harry?"


	17. chapter 17 To The Honour of the Mother

_Author's Note: JKR owns the Harry Potter universe and the characters therein.  Anyone you don't recognise is from my imagination._

Thanks as always to my wonderful beta reader, OzRatBag2.  Please read "At Any Moment," her latest work, on Fanfiction.net.

Chapter 17:  By the Roots and the Rocks…

****

Dame Angharad walked down by the lake in the soft evening light.  As she passed, the giant squid rose out of the waters and gazed at her with his one goggling wise eye.  She held out her hand in blessing, and the squid beat his tentacles in the water, turning it to frothing bubbles reflecting a million rainbows.

She sat down on a stone bench overlooking the water garden, with its floating lotuses.  The grey and black striped tabby cat at her side sat and tidily wrapped her tail around her feet.  They stayed thus in companionable silence for a while, and then the cat reached out her velvet paw and tapped a fold of the Green Lady's gown.  Dame Angharad moved over on the bench to accommodate Professor McGonagall, Transfigured back into her human form.

Minerva took off her hat and put it on the grass at her feet.  "It's as if one threw a stone into the lake –" here, she paused, found a small stone and threw it into the water – "it was only a pebble, but the ripples spread over the lake to every shore.  Nothing is left unchanged."

The Green Lady nodded in agreement.  "One ripple has reached an unexpected shore, has it not?  Now there are counter-ripples reaching back to Hogwarts.  I read the runes yestereve, Minerva.  

"What does the Headmaster say?"  

Dame Angharad noticed a stray lock that had escaped from McGonagall's prim bun, twirled it around her finger and tied an elflock into it.  

McGonagall smiled.  "Yes, we talked far into the night.  Albus is concerned about the release of the information to the wizarding world in general; he is afraid that there will be panic.  We've suffered so much…" She looked down, pleating the fabric of her gown in her fingers.  "I told him that it's all in how it's presented.  This is _not _the Black Plague."

"No," said Dame Angharad.  "Furthermore, it's been with us since the Beginnings.  No-one recognised it before; it was accepted as ordinary.  Some wizards, upon reaching extreme old age, become children again, and are cared for as such.  'Tis as it's always been."

"It's the Muggles," McGonagall replied.  "They never used to live long enough to become children again.  In the past fifty or so years, they've started to live longer and longer, and as they reach what for them is great old age – they become children.  Now there are cases in Muggles who are not extremely old.  They don't think of it as a natural thing.  They're terrified of it."   She looked across the lake, and her jaw tightened.  "They never take proper care of their own.

"When I read the letter from Beauxbatons, I was shocked.  I hadn't realised the extent of the problem. Beauxbatons have established a research clinic; they are working together with the Sorbonne to find a cure, and they asked me for a recommendation; a gifted graduate who could work as a researcher on the project.  Immediately I thought of Miss Granger; it's perfect for her."

"And so ye asked her?"

McGonagall reached for Dame Angharad's hand.  "It was dreadful," she said quietly.  "I told her that I had good news, and that she should come to my office.  She did – with Severus.  When I told her about the project, her eyes lit up.  It's what she's always wanted.  Then…" she looked down, compressed her lips, drew a breath and looked up again.  "She looked at him, and I could see the confusion in her eyes.  And as for Severus …" she broke off, unable to continue.

"Is it not strange, Minerva, that good news brings such conflict?"

"Severus… You've worked on him, Angharad, I must give you credit for what seemed like an impossible task well done.  What will happen to him?  He has just found his faith as he found his love, and now he is balanced on a thin edge between madness and grief."

The Green Lady rose, pulling McGonagall with her.  "Come, Minerva, there's little we can do sitting by the lake."

Two hours earlier, Professor McGonagall had received Hermione and Severus in her office.  "I'm glad you've both come," she said.  "I've received a communication from Beauxbatons.  They have joined with the Sorbonne and several of the teaching and research hospitals, both Muggle and wizarding, to try to find a cure for a disease you have probably never heard of."

Hermione looked curiously at her.  "Professor, how does this involve me?"

"I've been asked to identify a gifted graduating student who can work on the research team," she answered.  It's a four -year program, and the student will come from it with a doctorate at the very least, and probably a Nobel Prize if a cure is found.  Hermione, this is what you've told me you want to do."

Hermione felt her heart stop.  "The Sorbonne," she breathed.  "Severus," she said.  "It's the opportunity of a lifetime."

Severus' hand turned icy cold in hers.  He looked at her gravely. "You would be in France for four years.  Is this your choice?"

Hermione looked at him, his face waxen pale.  _How could she leave him?  _ She bit her lip.  "It's the work I've always wanted to do."  She turned to Minerva:  "What is the disease?"

Professor McGonagall sighed.  "It's never been of any concern in the wizarding world, but now that Muggles are leading longer lives, it's been affecting them in their great old age.  It was discovered by a Muggle doctor named Alzheimer."

"I have to think about this," Hermione said.  She looked at Severus.  His eyes were flat black slate, unreadable.  "_We _have to talk about it."

"Please let me know your decision as soon as you can, Miss Granger," said McGonagall.  She watched them rise together and leave her office.  She squinted her eyes:  Severus' aura had turned a pallid yellow-green.  She sighed.  

Hermione and Severus sat together on a bench in the garden, one of their favourite places.  He drew a deep breath.  "Hermione," he said, "we have talked much about what you will do in the future; we've discussed Edinburgh, St Mungo's, the Ministry and countless other alternatives.  You can write your own entrance ticket; you know that.  It's – just rather sudden, this summons to France…"  He looked down at her small hand resting in his.

"I think that nothing's a coincidence," Hermione replied.  "Remember, Severus, you saw the plaques and tangles of this disease in your Doors of Perception vision, and you were concerned that you would be afflicted by it.  I don't think that's the meaning; I think that because I may help to find the cure, it's going to affect both of us."

Severus put his arm around her shoulder.  _He's shaking,_ thought Hermione with surprise. She reached her arms around him and held him tightly.  "No, love, don't be frightened," she whispered, wondering why she said it, and then realizing why:  "I'm not leaving you.  I won't leave you unless you toss me off the Astronomy Tower, and even then I'll Transfigure into a screech owl and fly back up and peck you on your nose."  He laughed in spite of himself.

Severus put her back and looked at her.  "I know you won't leave me – not forever.  But you are called to this work for a reason, and as you say, nothing's a coincidence. You should go, Hermione, and take the opportunity."  He held her against his heart, willing that the sobs not tear out of his throat.

"I have to tell you something, Severus," Hermione said into his shoulder.  "You told me once that you realised your loneliness, that you despaired of ever having the companionship and comfort of love – how did you put it?  'Someone to sit by the fire and read poetry with, cook dinner together with, walk along the lake together-' That is the life you've never known.  That's the life _I _want, Severus, with you." 

Snape buried his face in her brown curls.  _I can't let her throw her chances away…_ He sat up and brushed her thick hair back with a gentle hand.  "Hermione, I could beg you to stay, I could say, 'Let us live that life we dream of, stay here with me.'  I cannot and will not do that.  You must make your own decision, as you would want me to do were the situation reversed.  

"And ask you to wait for me?"  Tears flooded out of Hermione's eyes.  "Oh, Severus, how can I ask that of you?  If you were going, would you ask it of me?"

He looked down.  "No," he said, almost inaudibly.  "I could not."  He rose, straight and tall, proud and still.  "I will not keep you from your future," he said, his voice almost inaudible.  "Go, and don't look back, Hermione."  _I can hear his heart cracking,_ she thought.

 "Goodnight, Miss Granger," he whispered, and ghosted off through the gardens.

 He managed to gain his office before he allowed himself to fall apart.  As if his equilibrium had left him, he staggered to his desk and fell into his chair, his head spinning.  An ugly iron door scraped open in his head, and hordes of monsters swarmed out, attacking him, chewing up his sanity.  

No-one to sit by the fire with, to read poetry with, no-one to talk out the dialogue of my heart with, no-one to finish my sentences, understand my obscurity, forgive my abruptness and warm my soul…

He put his head down on his knees.  The ice-cold wind of loneliness whistled out of the past, chilling him to his bones. _Solitary confinement? _Recollections of imprisonment gibbered at him, the timeless time in Azkaban.  He threw his head back and howled like a dog, like a solitary wolf.  He wailed inconsolably, his heart torn into shreds.  _Better had I never known her…_

She ran.  She flew down to the dungeons:  as she approached Severus' door, a powerful blast of wind hurled her backwards.  _Warded…_  She turned and ran back, her heart pounding, then stopped.  She crept back along the wall, holding on to it, till she reached the ward.  "Severus!  Severus!  Let me in!" she cried.  Her voice echoed off the powerful force field.  There was no answer.

She flew towards the staircases.  In the first corridor, there was a fireplace on the Floo network…gasping for breath; she threw in a handful of Floo powder.  "Professor Snape," she cried.  Nothing happened.   A cold hand crept up her spine; the hairs on the back of her neck prickled.  "Oh, gods!" she sobbed.  "He's going to kill himself!"

***~***


	18. Chapter 18 Brotherly Concerns

_Author's Note: JKR owns the Harry Potter universe and the characters therein.  Anyone you don't recognise is from my imagination._

Thanks as always to my wonderful beta reader, OzRatBag2.  Please read "At Any Moment," her latest work, on Fanfiction.net.

**_Chapter 18:  Brotherly Concerns_**

Without realising what she was doing, Hermione wiped her eyes on Headmaster Dumbledore's robe.  She had torn into his office, shrieking, hysterical, and flung herself at the old man's feet, begging him to keep Severus Snape from ending his life.

Gradually, the story poured out:  Severus could not, would not keep her from accepting the offer from the Sorbonne.  Faced with losing Hermione to a brilliant career, he seemed to have abandoned his usually logical mind.  The pain was too much to bear.

"He – he said that if he were going, he could not ask me to wait for him.  But I _will_ come back, I will come back to him!"  She buried her head in her hands.

"It's in the way of things," said Dumbledore gently, "that a long separation often sends people on separate paths.  Severus has lived a long life, he's travelled, and he's had several lifetimes' worth of experiences.  He knows that you've seen nothing of the world, and that this is your opportunity to learn about it.  He is ready to settle down and he thinks that you are _not."_  He patted her gently on the shoulder. "Come, child, sit on this chair."  He reached into the air and retrieved a tea tray with two cups and a pot shaped like a beehive.

Hermione rose from the floor and sat on the chair next to the Headmaster's desk.  "I want to settle down," she said dully.  "I want to go to France.  Oh, Headmaster, I want both.  More than anything, I want to be with Severus."  She accepted a cup of tea and held it in both trembling hands. 

For a few moments she sat silently, sipping her tea.  Then, she set her cup down on the Headmaster's desk.  Tears welled up again, and she wiped them away with her sleeve.  "I'm used to being honest with myself," she said.  "I have no doubt that Severus cares for me, that he wants us to be together."  She bit her lip. "He hasn't asked me to marry him. It's the one concern I have, that if I stay, if I build my life around him, his work, his needs, that the commitment will be all on my side."

Headmaster Dumbledore stroked his long white beard.  "Dear child," he said softly, "Severus isn't going to kill himself.  If he hasn't done it until now after all he's endured, he will never do it.  He respects all life, including his own, and he won't take it."  Albus stood then and walked around his desk. He held out his hand, and Hermione rose from her chair to find herself enveloped in a comforting hug.  "He is terrified of losing you."

"I still have to figure out what I should do," she whispered into the tickly white beard.  Dumbledore put her back, and patted her cheek.  "You know what you have to do," he said.  "Give Severus some little time to sort out what he has to do.  You know, there are no such things as coincidences, and the gods always know what must be done.  Trust them."

Hermione kissed the old man's cheek and turned to go.  "Headmaster," she said, "thank you."  Fawkes darted his magnificent tail and called to her.  She walked over to his perch and stroked the soft feathers at his nape.  He put his head sideways and clucked at her.  Then, he rummaged on his back with his beak, straightened and offered her one of his tail-feathers.   "Oh, Fawkes," she whispered, a tear rolling down her cheek.  The phoenix collected up the tear with his curved beak, emitted a loud squawk and settled down again on his perch.  

Hermione paced along the corridor, head down.  She didn't see Harry until he was even with her, and had put his arm around her shoulders.  She leaned her head against him.  "Harry, please talk some sense into me," she said.  "I've lost all of mine."  They then turned into the corridor leading to Gryffindor Tower.

Two hours later they were still in the Common Room.  Harry had found some chocolate frogs and was sharing them with Hermione.  She was exhausted, and Harry rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.  "Hermione," he said, "you're the one with the – what is it called? Superior reasoning skills.  There's got to be a way to resolve this situation."   He rolled the foil covering from the last chocolate frog in his fingers.  Then he sat back abruptly, as if he had received a blow to the head.

He leaned forward and took Hermione's hands.  "It's a research program, isn't it?"

"Yes…"

"And it's Wizards and Muggles working together, right?"

"Yes, but…"

"If it wasn't crushingly important, they _wouldn't_.  We go our way and they generally go theirs."

Hermione thought.  "It's only recently that we've even acknowledged Muggle medicine.  Come to think of it, when Severus was sick with that awful 'flu two years ago, and he was allergic to porcupine quills, which are in almost all of our curative potions, I had to owl my Mum to get me the medicine that cured him."

"So," Harry replied, "They're going to need experts from both worlds.  And we –" he looked at her pointedly – know one of the wizarding world's acknowledged masters, don't we?"  Hermione's hands clenched around his, her eyes widened.

"_Why didn't they send for him?"_

Harry shrugged.  "If I were him, I'd be pissed," he said. He leaned forward again.  "I'll bet he _is_ pissed.  He loves you, Hermione, and he's proud of you, but he probably isn't even aware that he's been passed over.  If he wasn't distracted by the threat of losing you, he'd be raging up and down the corridors, bellowing about the French and raising Hades because they didn't approach him."

Hermione felt a smile push at her lips.  The image of the Potions Master stalking back and forth, clenching his fists, roaring insults, turning mid-stride, his cloak billowing theatrically about him, was a familiar one.  "That's Severus Snape, spot on," she said. Her eyes narrowed.  "Why didn't they call him, indeed?" she said.  "I hope it isn't too late to see Professor McGonagall.  Come on," she said, and dragged Harry over to the fireplace.  She threw in a handful of Floo powder.  "Professor McGonagall," she said.

A moment later Minerva McGonagall's head appeared in the flames. "Children?" she said.  "It's late, why aren't you asleep?"

"Can we come to see you, Professor?  It's critical," stated Hermione.

"Very well," said the Transfigurations Professor.  "I will see you on Gryffindor Tower balcony; it's a warm night.  Fresh air always helps."

***`***

_This was the one place he felt safe._  Severus Snape slouched in his desk chair.  That lump of ice that used to reside in his soul, the icy stone he thought had been melted by the light and warmth that was Hermione Granger, sat in his chest.  It was so cold that he could not get warm, and he had given up trying.  Even his fingertips looked pinched, as if suffering from hypothermia.

For hours he had tried to calm his mind, to use the precise and rational thought processes he relied upon to order his world.  For hours he had been unable to do so, returning again and again to the cramped, cold, lightless cell in which his spirit dwelt before the Mother had dragged him into the sunlight.

_What was to be done?  _Was there _anything_ to be done?  He rejected out of hand asking Hermione to refuse the opportunity to participate in what was surely one of the greatest humanitarian efforts ever mounted.  He had been trying to work up the courage to ask her to be his wife, but there was still a remnant of his own self-loathing that crept up to his ear and hissed, _'Marry you, you loathsome reptile? Can you bear it when she responds to your proposal by laughing in your face?'_  Better, indeed, had he – but then, it had started years ago, had it not, when she forced him to see her brilliance, her insight, her awesome mind, and her monumental Gryffindor compassion?  _Hermione,_ the heart of his soul…

There was a tap on the door.  Snape looked up in surprise: he had warded not only his doors, but most of the corridor leading to them as well.

He rose and strode to the door, pulled it open.  There stood Harry Potter.  He held a Phoenix feather in his hand. _So that's how he got through the wards…_

"Potter!" he breathed.  "What the Devil are you doing here?" Potter, of all people – to knock on his door, to approach him voluntarily?  It had not happened in seven years; what could he possibly want now?

Potter looked up at him.  _Damn, the prat still looked eleven years old_.  "Well? What is it, Potter?  Can you speak, or are you determined to enrage me by standing there speechless all night?"

Potter drew a long breath.  "Professor Snape, I need to speak to you on a most important matter," he said.  "I promise I will be brief."

This was a surprise.  Potter, speaking as if he were an adult? _He is an adult,_ Snape reminded himself.

"Well, what is it, then?  I have neither time nor patience to listen to your twaddle."

"May I come in?"  Snape stood aside, and Harry entered the Potions office.  _This is the first time I've been here and it has nothing to do with detention_, he thought.  _I hope it has nothing to do with detention._  "May I sit down?"

Snape glowered at him.  "Dammit, Potter, this is not a social call," he grated.  "Sit." He pointed to a chair in front of his desk. "I give you thirty seconds to state your business and get out."  He slammed his hourglass upside down.

Harry had never seen the Potions Master look so awful, and he had seen him after brutal sessions with Voldemort, when he was close to death.  The man was a sickly shade of green, his greasy hair clung to his gaunt cheeks, and Harry noticed that his hands were shaking badly.  Hermione had not exaggerated; he did look as if he were preparing to end his miserable life.

Nevertheless, he was here on an errand, and discharge it he must.  He sat up straight and drew a deep breath.  "Professor Snape, Hermione has no brothers.  She thinks of me as family; she's got no-one left.  In lieu of a brother, I'm asking you what your intentions are towards her."

Snape gaped at him. "What – what—" he stammered.

Harry drew himself up.  "Hermione loves you.  She's said she would marry you, but you haven't asked her to.  If you're going to spend your lives together, you should marry.  Is that your intention, sir?"

"What—how—" Snape gasped like a beached fish.

 "Since I'm as much of a brother as she can ever have, Hermione confides in me.  I know about the invitation from the Sorbonne.  I know how much she cares about you.  I also know that they should have called _you, _the Wizarding world's top Potions Master.  And for all I know, they might just do that.  Or – " he paused, watching the puzzlement in Snape's eyes, "you might offer your services.

"If you're going to go to France, that would make a nice honeymoon."  Harry edged back in his chair.  Had he gone too far?  Snape was still staring at him, his mouth open.  He looked for all the world as if he had been hit upon the head by a bludger.

Harry leaned forward again, with concern.  Was the Professor all right?  _What would Dumbledore do? _Harry thought.  He had been of half a mind to bring the Headmaster along, but upon thinking it through, he decided that he had to do it himself.  It was about time that he got over his childhood terror of Severus Snape, Potions Master of Hogwarts.

Harry stood up.  He pulled his wand from his sleeve. _Hot chocolate,_ he thought, visualising the rounded cups, the fragrant steam, and the puffs of whipped cream… A tray with a chocolate pot, two mugs and a plate of biscuits presented itself to his hand.

Carefully, Harry set the tray down on the Professor's desk.  He poured chocolate into the cups, and offered one to Snape.  "Chocolate helps, sir," he said.

Snape looked him up and down, and accepted the cup.  Then he sat back, and a long sigh escaped his lips.  "Potter," he said wearily.

The sand in the hourglass had run out.  "I know I'm out of time—" he started to say.  Snape waved his hand at him.  "Do shut up for a moment, Potter," he said. He sat back in his chair and tasted his chocolate.  His mouth turned down: _"Desapparate whipped cream,"_ he said, and the whipped cream obligingly vanished.

Snape fixed Harry with an obsidian stare.  "Said she'd marry me, did she?  Or is that what you _think_ she should have said?"

Harry's chin jutted up and his brows drew down. _Miserable git,_ he thought.  "I asked her, point blank: 'Do you want to marry him?' and she said, 'Yes, I do.' She's got a mind of her own, you know."

Snape took in a deep breath.  "Yes, I know, Potter. So you thought you'd come here and defend her honour."

Harry frowned.  "I'm asking about _your_ honour, Professor. Do you want to marry _her?" _Harry noticed that the Potions Master's hands were shaking.  Quickly, he took the chocolate cup from Snape before it spilled all over the papers on the big oak desk.  Snape pushed back his desk chair, bent over, and buried his face in his hands.

_Oh, gods, Snape, upset?  _ Harry quickly walked around the desk.  Without stopping to consider the effect of his actions, he put his hand on the Potions Master's shoulder.  Snape was _trembling!_  He sat up, and looked at Harry.  A universe of sorrow revolved in those black eyes.

"Want to marry her?  Yes, I want to marry her.  I want to spend whatever is left of my life with her, to never be away from her, and gods help me, if I have to have _you_ for a brother-in-law, it could have been worse, I suppose; it could have been Weasley."

"You don't have to be away from her.  I'll bet the Sorbonne would be honoured to have you work on the project."   Harry walked around the desk and sat down again.  "Sir, I know that you've made a commitment to Headmaster Dumbledore to help to bring Voldemort down permanently.  You would always honour that commitment, no matter where you were."

Snape stood up and stretched with both hands at the small of his back.  Harry, never having seen the man exhibit any sign of vulnerability, was astonished.  Snape regarded him with his trademark serpentine glare:  "I have vertebrae like every other human, Potter, much to your evident surprise," he drawled. "And those vertebrae are aching, as is my head from having spent – what? A quarter of an hour with you, without levying detention or worse upon your unworthy Gryffindor head.  Get out of my sight, Potter, I have some thinking to do."

He pointed Harry towards the door.  Impulsively, Harry grasped Snape's hand in his.  "Thank you for taking the time to speak with me, Professor," he said.  "And, Professor Snape – if you want to practise proposing –"

"Get OUT!" Snape roared.


	19. Chapter 19 A Proposal

_Author's Note: JKR owns the Harry Potter universe and the characters therein.  Anyone you don't recognise is from my imagination._

Thanks as always to my wonderful beta reader, OzRatBag2.  Please read "At Any Moment," her latest work, on Fanfiction.net.

Chapter 19: A Proposal

****

Brigit McDiarmaidh and Dame Angharad stood together, leaning on the ledge of the balcony of Ravenclaw Tower, enjoying the cool, soft night breeze.

"Such a moon," remarked the red-haired druid.  "'Tis a lovers' moon, so round and full."  She stretched out her hand towards the glowing orb.  Moonbeams and little morsels of light darted around her fingers.

 "Stubborn is that Severus to the end!" she fumed.  "For all the effort we've put into that man, 'twas evidently not enough; his spirit is not healed."

"I think not, Brigit," said the Green Lady.  "He has come far indeed, but 'twas too soon for him to bear all the circumstances.  I did not foresee that Hermione would be called away.  He is heart-broken; he fears the worst."

"Fear clouds the mind's eye," remarked Brigit.  "Have ye seen him – skinny and wretched, no sleep has he had either?"  

"He is afraid of the dreams," said the Green Lady.  "They have returned.  He is like a little child; we must remind him to nourish himself, to sleep – and, perhaps, to comfort him."

Brigit compressed her lips.  "Ye spoil him, Angharad," said she.

'Would ye box his ears yet again?"

"Worked the first time," Brigit said stoutly.

An hour and a half earlier, Harry and Hermione had knocked on Professor McGonagall's door.  She opened it for them, and led them into her tiny, cluttered sitting room.  McGonagall herself wore a tatty old plaid housecoat, incongruous backless high-heeled pink satin mules on her feet, and her head was tied up in a kerchief.  Hermione thought she saw traces of something pale green on the Professor's forehead and jaw.

"Come in, come in," said Minerva McGonagall.  "I don't think anyone's going to get much sleep until this situation is resolved.  Hermione, first of all – " she patted the girl's hand – "Severus isn't going to kill himself.  He is, however, sinking himself into a particularly self-indulgent morass of fright and anxiety."

Harry sat down on the settee, pulling Hermione with him.  He put his shoulder firmly against hers.  "Professor McGonagall, what can I do to help?"

The Professor looked at him with an appraising eye.  "Be a friend to both," she said simply.  "You can't help either Hermione or Severus to solve their problems, but you can be a good support when you're needed."

Harry twisted the hem of his robe in his hands.  That was not enough for him.  _I've got to help her – I did what I could with him, but who knows what he'll do, if anything..  _Something _has to be done._

"I should go to him, Professor," Hermione said.  "He has to know that I won't leave him."

"Then you've made your decision?"

Hermione hung her head.  "No," she said, almost inaudibly.  Tears rolled down her face.  Harry handed her his handkerchief.  Abruptly, he sat up straight and looked at her.  

"What if he came with you?"

"_What?"  _Hermione and Professor McGonagall said it at the same time.  "Come with her/me?  How?"

Harry raised his chin.  "Headmaster Dumbledore says, 'Where there's a will, there's a way,' he said.  "It's a big research project, isn't it, Professor?  Experts from all over the worlds will be working on it."

Minerva's eyebrows rose until they almost touched the edge of her kerchief.  "Mr. Potter," she said warningly,  "If you are intimating what I _think_ you are…"

Harry shrank away from her.  "Professor, please, I don't mean to speak out of turn, but …" He sat up and took a breath. "Somebody's got to try."  

"Well," said Minerva, "that somebody had better be me, not you, Harry.  You should stay with Hermione, that is—"

"It's certainly worth a try," said Hermione.  She leaned her head on Harry's shoulder.  "But Severus has to want it.  I'll talk to him."  She sank her head down on her knees.  When she raised her face, it was drawn and pale.  "Oh, gods.  I'm scared," she said, and wept again.

"You'll talk to no-one tonight," stated Minerva.  "You'll stay right here, child.  You can sleep on the settee; it's roomy enough, and I want to keep an eye on you.  _Accio_ Crookshanks," she said, and an orange bundle of fluff landed on Hermione's lap, hissed to express his annoyance with the transportation arrangement, circled twice and settled himself into a neat coil, purring.

"I'll – I'm not sure what I'm going to do, but I'm going to do it," said Harry.  He kissed the top of Hermione's head.  Then, tentatively, he put out his arms to Professor McGonagall, and got a tight hug and three knocks on the back.  He was reluctant to tell anyone what he had already done, that he had bearded Snape in his den, and that he had no idea if it had done any good at all.

"The gods speed you," the witch called after him.

***~***

The morning sun shot a golden beam through Severus Snape's bedchamber window.  The Potions Master was still sitting in his desk chair, his head in his hands.  _Imagine, a midnight social call from Mr Harry Potter…_Not only had it not been a social call, but Potter, unbelievably, had come up with a practical course of action.  Severus rose and stretched his cramped back.  In another hour, the wizarding community would be stirring, rising, getting ready to face another day.  He opened a folder on his desk and took out a sheet of parchment, an envelope, and a blotter.  He selected a quill, opened his inkwell, and began to write in his precise, crabbed hand:

Monsieur Henri Leboeuf-Schramm 

_Ecole Beauxbatons_

_Paris, France_

Dammit, Leboeuf spoke English as well as he did; no need to struggle along in the miserable language.  Snape sighed.  Aside from handling a menu with a fair degree of competence, the furthest extent of his French was, _"Ou est la toilette?" _and _"Donnez-moi l'addition, s'il vous plait."_ He took up his quill again, mentally reviewing the roster in the Owlery.

***~***

Hermione sat up on Professor McGonagall's settee.  The sun, peeping through large, fluffy clouds, streamed in through the mullioned windows.  Crookshanks sat on a windowsill, washing himself industriously.  Hermione noticed two small dishes on the floor next to a table: Leave it to Professor McGonagall to remember to feed the cat.

She rose and went into the Professor's small, tidy bathroom.  In half an hour she emerged, clean and dressed, her unruly hair bound back at her nape with a black ribbon.  

She went over to the window.  Crookshanks bumped his head against hers, and gave her The Tooth, the marking with special glands at the side of the mouth that cats only give to those they love.  She patted him, and then went over to her own room to collect her books.

The thought of breakfast made her slightly queasy.  _I've got to see him before I do another thing, _she said.  Resolutely, she set off for the dungeons.  Hopefully, Snape had released the wards.

She turned the corner towards the long staircase that led down into the dungeons, and found herself face to face with Severus Snape.  He looked terrible.  Her heart constricted with pity and fear.  To her surprise, he held out his arms to her, and she rushed into them.  She could do no more than whisper his name.

He stroked her hair and rested his chin on top of her head.  Then he put her back and looked at her intently.  "Come," he said.  He took her hand and put it on his arm, in the old style.  She looked at him curiously.  They turned around and headed for Dumbledore's office.  "Tootsie Rolls," said Severus, and the gryphon obligingly revolved.  They started up the spiral staircase.

"Does the Headmaster expect us?" Hermione asked.

"He does," said Severus gravely.  They were greeted by the sight of Albus Dumbledore rummaging amongst the scrolls and books in an overflowing bookcase.

"Sit down, sit down," he said, waving them towards chairs.  "Ah, Severus."  The old man sat down behind his desk, leaned forward and clasped his hands.  "Have you heard anything yet?"

"What?  Heard what?" Hermione questioned.  She looked at the Headmaster. _Gods, he can be irritating, _she thought.  He looked just like Crookshanks when he caught a field mouse.

The Headmaster settled his cap firmly on his white hair.  "Hermione, I realise you don't have the latest information," he said, his eyes twinkling.  "Severus, you must tell her."

"Tell me what?"  Hermione felt like screaming, like banging their heads together, then banging her own head against the nearest wall.  "What's happening here?"  Tears rose in her throat.  She was _so_ sick of crying.  She appealed to Severus:  "Tell me!  Tell me whatever you have to say, anything is better than not knowing!" She steeled herself for the worst.

Severus took her hand, opened his mouth, and at that exact moment, there was a loud thump on the Headmaster's window.  They looked over to see a large white and grey owl perched on the windowsill.  Dumbledore opened the window.

The bird flew directly to Severus and dropped an envelope into his hand.  Then it pecked him sharply on the arm. "Ouch!" the Potions Master grated.  "Have you naught to feed the damned thing?"

The Headmaster chuckled.  "I don't think he'll accept anything less than _foie gras,_" he said.   He waved his hand in the air, and a small bowl with neat slices of _paté de foie gras_ appeared. The owl hopped over to it and began to feed. 

Hermione was at the end of her patience.  She leaned over Snape's arm.  "Please, Severus, open it!" she cried.  He put his hand gently on her cheek.  Then he opened the envelope and withdrew the thick, creamy parchment.  He began to read:

 "Mon cher Professor Snape," it began.  Severus passed his hand over it, translating the text of the letter into English.  Hermione was practically in his lap; he put his arm around her, and together they read, "… Will be honoured greatly by your participation in this most worthy of efforts.  As you know, we have recently elevated Master Gaston Lachaise to the position of Potions Master, and he will be most pleased with the opportunity to serve at Hogwarts until your return, depending of course upon your approval."

Hermione thought she would faint.  She leaned back against Snape's shoulder. "What did you do?" she whispered.

Snape pushed an errant curl off her forehead.  "I owled a letter to an old colleague at Beauxbatons who heads the research project," he said.  "I reminded him that I had worked with him on a similar project quite a number of years ago, and I've  volunteered to work on this effort if he could find a temporary professor of Potions for Hogwarts during my absence."

Dumbledore beamed.  He took up a silver bowl shaped like a platypus:  "Lemon drop, anyone?"   He popped one into his mouth.  

"So you're going to France?"  Hermione asked.  She felt stupid and thick: what wasn't she understanding?

"Yes," said Severus.  "I am going to France.  With you.  _We_ are going to France together, to work at the Sorbonne.  How is your French?"

Hermione's eyes rolled upwards in her head.  For the first time in her life, she swooned, in the arms of her love, no less.  Dumbledore hastened around his desk, looking frantically for smelling salts.  Severus wrapped her in his arms and held her to his heart.  Little by little, a smile touched his lips, and he closed his eyes.

***~*******

It was only with great difficulty that Albus Dumbledore, that most well meaning of busybodies, restrained himself from bellowing, "And how is our loving couple this evening?" when Hermione and Severus sat down at the Masters' Table.  Hermione, although a graduate student, was not yet a Mistress, and so she sat in a guest's chair, with a low back.  Chatter went back and forth as usual as the dinner appeared on the tables.  Headmaster Dumbledore noticed that the lovers sat side by side, with great dignity, talking to others around them as well as between themselves.  

"Good manners will out," remarked Minerva.  "They look so sweet together, don't you think?"

"I hardly think 'sweet' is the right description for Severus, but I've never seen him look this relaxed," answered Dumbledore.  "It's about time."

Hermione served herself a small whole trout, nicely grilled.  She cut it open and prepared to pick out the bones.

"Allow me," said Severus. He passed his hand over the trout, his long fingers curling gracefully, and the skeleton of the fish rose entire out of the flesh and 'swam' through the air over to an empty bowl. There was applause from the other diners at the Masters' Table.

Hermione's eyes sparkled.  "That was lovely!" she exclaimed.  "Please try some of this trout," and she took a piece on her fork and offered it to him.  Severus opened his mouth, accepted the fish and chewed it thoughtfully.  

"Excellent," he said.  "You are ever thoughtful of me.  I suppose I shall become used to it."

"I hope so," said Hermione.  "I expect to spoil you rotten. If French cuisine is what it's rumoured to be, I'll get a little more flesh on your bones, while I'm at it."

He smirked.  "Rotten I am anyway, my dear, it will take little effort. Doubtless Dame Angharad will be pleased at your determination to feed me until I burst my buttons."  He looked at her.  "Hermione, I must discuss something with you, seriously."

"Very well, I'm listening," she responded.

"Hogwarts has been my home for most of my life, and Albus Dumbledore has been more than a father to me.  This is my family, even the worst of them, and they deserve my respect.  Albus, Minerva, Poppy, Filius, of course Hagrid – as I say, even Filch– have told me repeatedly that they want only to see me happy.  They've all suffered along with me, despaired as I despaired, and brought me back from the dead countless times.  Why, they've put up with my awful temper and meanness of spirit, and even-"

Hermione put her hand over his.  "Yes, Severus, I know.  It's not like you to blather on.  I think you're trying to say something.  What is it?"

He harrumphed into his napkin and took a long swallow of pumpkin juice.  Then he drew himself up and took her hand.  He leaned close, so only she could hear him.

"Trust you to cut to the heart of the matter, Hermione.  I believe that I am, erm, ready to make a commitment to lead a happy life."  He paused, watching her face.

"Well said," she replied.  "They're my family now, and they want to see me happy as well." She looked him directly in the eyes.  "I believe that we are ready to leave our sadness and our pasts behind us."

"Yes," said Severus.  "And since we will be travelling to Paris, I believe that new beginnings are appropriate before we commence work at the Sorbonne."

Severus stood, and carefully pushed back his chair.  He took Hermione's hand, and she rose, her heart in her mouth.  _What now?_

He led her around the table until they stood in front of it.  Then, in full view of the entire student body of Hogwarts, all of the masters, the kitchen elves, Mrs Susan Dowd and the castle ghosts (there was a loud whooshing, as the ghosts assembled on the ceiling), Severus Snape knelt on one knee in front of Hermione Granger.  He kissed her hand and looked up at her.  "Hermione Granger, will you marry me?"

Hermione knelt in front of him, holding tight to his hand.  In a clear, ringing voice, she said, "Yes, I will.   The more important question, Severus Snape, is, will _you_ marry _me?"_

"Yes, I will," he answered loudly. 

The students rose as one to their feet, cheering riotously.  "There's going to be a wedding!" shrieked Ginny Weasley.  "A wedding!  With bridesmaids, and fancy dress gowns, and dancing, and a chocolate cake, and—"

"Silence!" Headmaster Dumbledore held his wand to his throat, and his voice belled out over the enormous Hall.  "You'll have time enough to make all the noise you want soon enough!" The racket was ear-splitting, and shook the rafters as Severus kissed Hermione's brow.  They returned to their seats, shaking hands and accepting hugs from the Masters as they passed them.  

:"Albus, I don't think you're going to be able to establish order just now," cautioned Minerva.  Her eyes sparkled.  She rose from her seat, shook Severus' hand and hugged Hermione.  "Congratulations," she said. "I shall dance a reel at your wedding, if I can get this old codger out of his seat."

"Old codger indeed!" fumed Dumbledore. "Minerva, if your bunions will cooperate, we'll have ourselves a dance!"


	20. Chapter 20 Consecrated to the Honour of...

Any characters you recognise are the property of JK Rowling; the rest are from my imagination.  The first slice of wedding-cake properly belongs to OzRatBag2, beta extraordinary, and she can have any flavour she fancies.

Blessings and thanks to Damiana; if you would like to be a guest at a Wizarding World wedding in full detail, from start to finish, please read her beautiful "Marrach," on adultfanfiction.net.

Chapter 20: Consecrated To The Honour Of The Mother

******__**

A Week Before the Wedding

The Gryffindor Common Room was at its best at about seven in the evening, before everyone came in for a break from homework, a chat before going to bed, a snack, a gossip or just to flop into a squashy armchair in the genial company of one's mates.

Harry, Ron and Hermione had commandeered the best armchairs; close to the fireplace.  "I'll miss this," said Ron.  "I'll miss our sitting around in the Common Room, talking about everything and nothing, plotting and planning and all."

"So will I," said Hermione.  "We would miss it in any case.  We're graduating next week, and even if I wasn't going abroad, we'd still be leaving Hogwarts."  She studied the apple in her hands.  "I used to think that Hogwarts was forever; that after graduation I'd stay on as a student teacher, become a Master, and live the rest of my life here."

"You never know," said Ron.  "The research project in Paris will come to an end and you'll come home.  I know you will."

Hermione looked at him. "Yes, _we'll _come home, Ron.  Severus and I will come back, and unless we've won fame and fortune and are renowned the world over –"

"Cor!  Listen to you brag!" scoffed Ron.  "Even if you go to America or- or Australia – this is your home, and you'll come back."

Hermione reached for his hand and held it tightly.  "Yes," she said.  "I wouldn't miss Christmas at Hogwarts, or Halloween, or the Leaving Feast.  Or your birthdays, you two prats."

"Then again," Harry drawled, slumping down in his chair and stretching out his toes towards the fire, "The Professor will want to come home and teach a class now and then, just to keep his hand in, so he doesn't forget how to give detention and snark at the students."  He chuckled.

Hermione laughed. "I shouldn't wonder," she said.  "It's taken him years to build that extraordinary terribleness of his, and he's not going to put it aside lightly."

Ron upended himself over the arm of his chair and groped for the bag of crisps he had left on the floor.  Righting himself, he opened the bag and offered it to Hermione and then to Harry.  "It's going to be right strange, Hermione, not having you around all the time."  He crunched on a handful of crisps.  "Can we – I mean, will it be all right for us to visit you?  Will _he_ mind?"

"No, he will not," said Hermione.  "Actually, I think he'll enjoy the company.  We won't have much time to entertain, especially in the beginning when we're first acquainting ourselves with the project, but once we're settled, it will be a nice break in the routine.  You might be interested to know that Severus chose our house with an eye to guest accommodations.  Look," she said.

Hermione took her wand out of her sleeve and drew a square in the air.  Immediately it took on the look of a television set, knobs and all, and there, as on a screen, was a narrow Parisian street.

"Look at the old street lights and the cobblestones!" breathed Harry. 

"Yes, isn't it quaint?  And here's the house," Hermione pointed to a small house painted a pale yellow, with blue wooden shutters on the tall windows.  Pots of geraniums bloomed on the four steps up to the front door, and flowers spilled out of the window boxes.

"Numéro 12, Rue des Anges," she said.  "Want to see the inside?"

Ron and Harry leaned forward, their eyes glued to the picture.  Hermione's wand conducted them on a tour through the front door, into the _foyer_ with its hall tree for hanging up coats, into the large kitchen with its big trestle table, through the dining room, into the parlour, with a stone fireplace, many squashy armchairs, a small harpsichord and two facing settees; and out of the back into the small garden, with its grape arbour, beds of herbs and vegetables and rose-bushes.

They came back through the House-Elves' quarters, and found themselves upstairs in the second floor hallway.  In the front, there were two guests' bedrooms, with a small bathroom between them.  In the rear of the house was one large bedroom, with its own bath.

"Where's your office?" asked Harry.  "You couldn't live without an office to fill up with papers and books and stuff."

Hermione laughed.  "That's the beauty of it!" she said.  "Here's how it works."  Their view returned to the master bedroom, over to one of the two large armoires.  A wave of the wand, and the armoire pivoted into _somewhere, _revealing a capacious office with a long worktable, many bookcases, two armchairs and what looked like typical Granger piles of books, scrolls and papers all over the floors, the tables, and on every flat surface.  It only wanted Crookshanks lying on the windowsill, the picture of contentment.

Their view traveled over to the other armoire, and when that one pivoted, lo!  It displayed what looked exactly like Snape's dungeon office and laboratory in Hogwarts!

Hermione extinguished the visual travelogue.  "So, you see, your rooms are waiting for you in Paris," she said.

  "And your old home is waiting for you in Hogwarts," Harry said.  "I've been talking myself hoarse the past days, telling everyone about you and – and Snape.  What are we supposed to call him now?"

"I'm not taking any chances, " Ron stated.  "I'm calling him Professor, same as always."

Eve of the Wedding

Hermione sat down on the soft green grass and leaned back against a cherry tree. "I'm so tired," she murmured.  "I've done nothing but talk, talk, talk for two weeks. Every student in the school wanted to speak to me – some were shy, some were sly, and some – well, they just didn't understand it."

"And so, with your infinite patience, you told them over and over again that, yes, we are going to be married, we are going to France, and that we expect to live happily ever after."  Severus Snape lounged on the grass at her side. He plucked a dandelion gone to seed and gave it to her to blow the silky parachutes into the evening air.  "It seems no-one believes that you are voluntarily marrying me."

Hermione laughed.  "What do they think?  That I'm marrying you at the point of a –what is it, that firearm?"

"A shotgun," Severus answered.  "It will be a great relief when all this fuss is over and done, and we can set about living our lives."

"Our lives," murmured Hermione. "Ever, and ever, and – Severus!"  

"What's the matter?"  Severus sat up and put his arms around her.  "You look as if you've just taken a bludger to the jaw."  He reached for her hand.

Hermione put her hand over his.  "I never saw it before, ": she said, her voice soft.  

"What? You're frightening me," said he. 

"It's your name.  Severus."  Her eyes were shining.  "Right there, when I say your name – ever.

Ever and ever after, always, forever, Severus."

He kissed her.  "Hermione…"

"What?"

"My–own, Hermione…it's right there, when I say your name." 

They sat side-by-side, looking into each other's eyes and whispering each other's names.

"Severus, we're not supposed to be together the night before the wedding," she told him.  "I should go back to Gryffindor, before you trap me here in your lewd embrace and we spend the night snogging."  

"Believe me, my dear, if I were to trap you in my lewd embrace, "snogging" wouldn't even begin to describe our revels. I'd better see you back to your maidenly quarters, then." 

As they approached the entrance to Gryffindor, the Fat Lady turned around in her portrait. "Good luck to you both!" she said.  "Professor, say your good-nights right here."

Snape put his arms around Hermione and they kissed lingeringly.  

"All right, you lot, it's getting late!" The Fat Lady drummed her fat fingers impatiently on her table.

"Sleep well, love," said Hermione.

"And you, my love," answered Severus.  "I'll see you tomorrow."

***~*******

_Consecrated to the__ Honour__ of the Mother ___

"There's nothing to be nervous about, dear," said Hermione soothingly, helping Minerva McGonagall to adjust her bonnet.  It was a splendid example of the milliner's art, indeed:  ruby red velvet, the right side of the brim secured to the crown by a gorgeous gold brooch from which sprouted a plume of Fawkes' iridescent tail feathers, and the point adorned with a tassel of gold beads.  Minerva fussed at her cloak fastenings: "Oh, it's so exciting I can hardly bear it!  We've never had a wedding at Hogwarts, and, of all people…" She dabbed at the corners of her eyes with a lace-bordered handkerchief 

"Now!  You'll ruin your eye makeup, Minerva!" Hermione scolded.  She had prevailed upon the Transfigurations Professor to apply a little eye shadow and mascara for the great occasion.  For a witch in her early hundreds, McGonagall was still beautiful, with her faintly feline air.  Hermione conjured an ivory fan for the lady, who took it with gratitude and was induced to sit down, relax and fan herself.

Professor Hooch rustled up, splendid in a sophisticated bronze taffeta gown and an astonishing hat that resembled an upended flowerpot with live blooms growing out of the hole in the bottom.  _Professor Sprout's been practising her hobby of hat-making, I see,"_ noted Hermione, trying to stifle a giggle.  Hooch pirouetted in front of them:  "Well?  Will I do?"

"Oh, you're a vision, dear," said McGonagall, fanning.  One could just imagine her Animagus form's tail lashing from side to side with amusement.

"Coming from you, Minerva, that could be bad news," said Hooch, plumping herself down next to her colleague.  She withdrew her wand from her sleeve and delicately scratched her head under her sleek French twist. The two senior witches bent their heads together and laughed.

"If you are all settled, I think someone had better find the Headmaster, before he gets into the punch," Hermione called, heading for the side door.  "It would be so embarrassing to be walked down the aisle by a tipsy Professor Dumbledore!"  

_Susan Dowd:  ___

__

For three days, Samuel and I and our staff of kitchen elves basted, stirred and seasoned; unmoulded, garnished and stuffed, fried, roasted, simmered and sautéed, shredded and scalloped, chilled and warmed the many dishes to be served at the feast. It seemed that every Mistress (and some of the Masters, as well) had a favourite family recipe, which just _had_ to be prepared for the great occasion!

I looked out at the long tables, all covered with white damask cloths, and set with heavy gold flatware, gold candelabra and urns of flowers. The Masters' Table was on a dais; three steps up, at the back of the room. All was in readiness. If I knew aright, the bride and groom would try to make their escape directly the ceremony was completed, and leave the guests to enjoy the lavish dinner.  If only I could convince them to stay long enough to cut their magnificent wedding cake!  Samuel beckoned to me; the chapel doors were open.  I wiped my hands on a kitchen towel and, together with Samuel, made my way to the chapel.  This was one occasion when I would not be stuck in the kitchen!

The chapel was filled with flowers, pots of lilies of all colours and scents, urns of roses twined with jasmine, garlands of orchids and freesias.  Beams of sunlight, coloured by their passage through the stained glass of the windows depicting the lives of the great mages, lay on the Masters' chairs and the students' benches. The altar was draped with holly and star ivy.   House Elves straightened the red carpet lining the centre aisle, then scampered over to watch from the side. Samuel and I squeezed in next to Professor Vector, who was already snuffling into a plaid handkerchief.

Music played from the ceiling:  some of the house ghosts were quite talented musicians, and if I listened around the chatter and hubbub, I could hear anything from "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" to the overture from "The Marriage of Figaro," played on a variety of instruments including the nose flute, the didgeridoo and a toy piano.

The students, wearing their dress robes, filed in.  They were quieter than usual, filled with awe.  Few of them had ever been in the chapel, which looked like a small, dusty chamber when it was not expanded, as it was now, to its full inter-dimensional size.  In honour of the occasion, Gryffindor house filled the first rows of the benches on the right next to the aisle. Slytherin house students sat in the rows on the left, and Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff sat behind them, to the left and the right sides of the centre aisle.  The students all stood and remained standing as the Masters entered, dressed in holiday finery.  Professor McGonagall looked over all, to make sure everyone was in their proper place. 

The 'Seven Maidens' entered and were guided by McGonagall to the right side of the altar.  They were wide-eyed and a little intimidated.  The young Gryffindor girls, including the young Weasley sister, all looked beautiful.  Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, dressed in their best formal robes, stood closest to the altar on the right side.

Then, the 'Seven Youths' came in, to stand to the left of the altar.  Puffed up and proud in their dress robes, the young princes of Slytherin swaggered over to their places, where they shoved and elbowed one another for the best place from which to see the ceremony.  After all, it was _their_ Head of House who was to be married!

The bride's few relatives entered and were ushered to chairs placed next to Gryffindor; following them, the entire Weasley family.  Some guests from the Ministry of Magic and elsewhere in the wizarding world made their entrances and were seated.  

From the back of the chapel, the Uillean pipes began to play an ancient air. Samuel nudged me: "Turn around, Susan!  Look!"  The double doors at the rear opened, and Dame Angharad, flanked by Druid priests and priestesses, paced down the long aisle and stood in front of the altar.  The Green Lady was, indeed, wearing green robes, with her spring-green veil over her wimple and a golden coronet set with emeralds around her head.  The green-robed Druids around her carried baskets of fresh herbs and flowers, sprigs of rosemary and vervain, fine tendrils of star ivy, with its wee star-shaped leaves, and branches of holly.  At her right hand stood the Druid seer Brigit McDiarmaidh, Madam Pomfrey's nurse aide, wearing green robes with the hood of her cloak over her carrot-red curls, and holding a cruse of holy water. 

The four pipers began to walk slowly forward.  Professor Vector whispered, in a quavering voice, "The groom!  The groom!"  The double doors opened once more, and the groomsmen entered with the groom between them.  Remus Lupin and Rubeus Hagrid held the arms of the lucky man.  Everyone turned around to see, and it was worth seeing.  Never had I seen anything like _this!___

__

The groom, straight and tall and proud, wore a moss green velvet dress jacket over a fine white linen shirt.  Lace dripped from the jacket's sleeves, which were fastened with gold buttons (galleons, I should think). Around the ruffled neck of his shirt, he wore a scarlet silk cravat.  Over that he wore a gold brocade vest, and to the astonishment of all, a tartan kilt in moss green, scarlet and gold – the tartan of his mother's clan, echoing the colours of Gryffindor and Slytherin.  To complete his outfit, the groom wore white stockings and black buckled shoes.  Crowning this vision of traditional splendour, the groom wore his shining black hair tiedin a tailat his nape, high colour on his cheeks, and a look of wonderment on his face.

 "By my grandmother's beard, 'tis himself!  Whoever would have thought it?"  Samuel remarked, and reached over to hold my hand.  I hoped I had a handkerchief in my apron pocket.

The groomsmen led Severus Snape him to the altar, and he bowed to the Druid priestess, then turned and bowed to the assembled witnesses.  Two priestesses walked to the rear of the chapel, swinging incense burners. The scent of sandalwood and lavender filled the air. _I've never prayed in my life,_ thought Snape, _but I'm praying now, to whatever gods and goddesses will hear me, that I may be worthy of this blessing, this gift.  _ He felt Lupin's grip tighten on his arm, and he realised that he was trembling.

He had dreamt again last night, his last night before his wedding.  Once again, he had found himself in the forest, at the ancient stone altar, and once again he knelt on the stone table before the dolmen.  The Green Lady, Dame Angharad, stood before him.

"What will ye offer the Mother?" she asked.

"My sorrow, my fear, my anger, my despair, my gratitude and my hope," he answered.

"What will ye ask of the Mother?"

"Only this:  that I be worthy to accept Her gifts."

He felt a strange sensation, a loosening of bonds.  As he watched, the Green Lady drew a thick rope of evergreen ivy away from his loins.  She held it up to the dolmen, and it winked out in a shower of green sparks.  The sparks burned his skin, and he awoke, swatting at their stinging, to a glorious sunrise and Remus Lupin and Rubeus Hagrid pounding on his door.

"Get up, you lazy git! We've got to get you shaped up, man!" 

"Bugger off!" groaned Snape, and buried himself in his pillows until the door swung open, and his groomsmen, already well flown with morning libations, roared in to drag him out of bed.  There had been much sniggering as he dressed; Remus had said loftily, "The groom's dress is prettier than the bride's!" and received Severus' iciest glare. After several false starts at getting the damned kilt to fold over properly so as not embarrass him by swinging open at inopportune times, he was ready. Severus took a last look at himself in his mirror, an ancient family antique that seldom spoke.  "Good fortune and good 'cess to ye, me boy," the old voice grated, and they were off to the chapel.

"Wait here for me a moment," Severus asked, as they passed the doors to the colonnade circling the Great Hall tower.  He stepped onto the columned balcony and stood, gazing at the misty Scottish hillside, mountains and valleys and the distant glimmer of a loch.  _How beautiful is this world, Mother, _he thought, _I never saw it before.  I never knew that it was my world too. _He listened to the liquid notes of the lark, smelled the fresh breeze and felt the sun on his face as if for the first time; as if he had lived underground all of his life.  _I'm so blessed, thank you again, Mother._

Remus watched him through the glass doors.  A man he had known most of his life as the "overgrown bat", surly, dissatisfied, corroded with anger, was now gone, and in his place there was a Romantic hero, standing with one hand on the balcony ledge, looking out over the lands like the Laird he was in fact, looking with favour and with gratitude on the blessed world he shared with all the Mother's children.

The double doors opened again, everyone rose, and the bride entered on the arms of Albus Dumbledore and Minerva McGonagall.  There was a chorus of "Oooh!"  Was this indeed Hermione Granger, the plain little woman, the bushy-haired Gryffindor know-it-all and bookworm? 

The bride shone like the morning star.  She was dressed in a Druid priestess' silk samite gown the white of white lilies and roses, with a girdle of gold Celtic ribbonwork around her hips, on her shoulders a white samite cloak fastened in front with gold clasps in the shape of the Claddagh, and trailing into a twenty-foot train bordered with ribbonwork.  Her gossamer white veil, which floated behind her, as long as her train, was held in place with a coronet of yellow gold and topazes. Her curly hair was bound about with a Rajah's ransom of pearls, a gift from the groom. She carried a bouquet of wild roses, white and pink, twined with columbine. 

Hermione stood still with astonishment at her first sight of the bridegroom. _Her _bridegroom. _I know I see him through the eyes of love, but I never realised – oh, he's beautiful!_  He was looking at her as if witnessing a miracle, his eyes shining.

Tall he had always been, proud and dignified he had always been, but she was unprepared for this splendid man, wearing a _kilt _(and fine legs he had, indeed!)  And with a smile from ear to ear!  _Straight white teeth._  He took a step forward and bowed to her.

Wiping away tears that flowed over his beatific smile, the Headmaster put back Hermione's veil and kissed her forehead.  Minerva, smiling proudly, kissed her and patted her hair.  Harry stepped forward, bowed to Hermione, and kissed her cheek. Bursting with pride, he held out his fist and placed her hand on it.  He walked up to the altar with her, and handed her over to her groom.  Together they turned to face the Green Lady.  A priestess came forward to take Hermione's bouquet.  Harry and Ron, together, stood at her side.

The ceremony seemed endless. Priestesses sang psalms to the accompaniment of harps.  The bride and groom murmured words in Gaelic; they bowed their heads to receive crowns of holly and ivy; they drank wine and ate cakes, they walked round each other three times, and then they put rings on each other's fingers.  They were showered with holy water. They repeated their vows to love and honour each other.

Dame Angharad pressed her palms together, and when she separated them, a golden chain sparkled between them.  She bound the golden chain about their joined hands.  The chain glimmered and winked, threw out a great corona of gilded rays, and disappeared into their hands.  

The priestess pressed her palms to their foreheads and intoned a blessing:  "Consecrated be this man and this woman to the honour of the Mother."  She held up her hands up, and faced the assemblage: "Let this company and the gods bear witness that Hermione and Severus are joined in love, joy and freedom, and that they are husband and wife.  So mote it be."

The response thundered back from the witnesses:  _"So mote it be."_

Hermione and Severus kissed, and turned to face the assemblage. Fawkes and the house owls flew up and circled the chapel, singing Alleluia, Mendelssohn erupted from a spectral organ on the ceiling, played by a jubilant Nearly Headless Nick, and flowers flew out of the air to bombard the newly wed couple.

Together, the bride and bridegroom walked back up the chapel aisle, between the ranks of wildly applauding and cheering guests, and into the Great Hall, where well-wishers surrounded them.  There were many toasts, and the wedding-gifts piled up on the side of the room.  Musicians on the side of the huge room tuned up, preparing to play for the evening's dancing

Mrs Susan Dowd and her husband Samuel entered with the enormous wedding-cake, under a _Mobilis_ spell, moving between them.  They set the cake down on a round table, and the bride and groom approached to cut it. "It's customary to do this," whispered Hermione. "It's supposed to be a moment we treasure forever."

"Bother," said the groom.  "Let's get out of here."

But there was the cake, a phenomenal nine-layered tower, the bottom three layers of chocolate cake, the middle three of rum, the next two of pumpkin spice, and the top of Dundee fruitcake.  The fabulous confection was all covered in Royal icing with gold and silver shot and buttercream roses and lilies with chocolate leaves.  The wee bride and groom on the very top, exact replicas in miniature of Hermione and Severus, waltzed in their little sugar pavilion, kissed and then danced a lively Gaillard.

Headmaster Dumbledore, Professor McGonagall, their friends and family were waiting, along with over five hundred others, for the good luck that eating a slice of wedding cake confers.

Hermione took up her wand, and Severus put his hand over hers. _"Torta divisorum,"_ they pronounced, and the cake neatly cut itself into six hundred slices.  One slice floated onto a plate, acquired a fork, and landed in Hermione's outstretched hand.  She turned to the waiting throng, cut a piece of the cake, and fed it to her new husband.  Everyone cheered.

Severus took the plate from her, ignored the fork, broke off a piece of the cake and fed it to his new wife from his fingers, and the roar shook the rafters.  Licking icing from his fingers, he took her hand, and together they walked out of the great main doors of Hogwarts Castle and over to a waiting carriage drawn by two white horses.  

The crowd surged out of the hall, waving at them, throwing flowers, launching doves, waving wands to send Roman candles and chrysanthemum fireworks displays aloft.  Hermione looked at the people who were more her family than her born kindred.  Minerva and Poppy were weeping unashamedly through their smiles; Headmaster Dumbledore waved with both arms.  And there, holding the horses' bridles, the dearest friends anyone could wish:  Harry and Ron.  Surrounding them were Ginny, Remus Lupin, Madam Pomfrey, the Professors, and all of her friends.

Hermione stopped next to them, and put her hand on Ron's shoulder.  He looked at her and impulsively hugged her, whispering, "You'll always be me chum, love.  And he had better treat you proper, or I'll turn him into a slime toad."  

"Don't fear," said Hermione.  "I'll always be your chum, and I'll always be here for you.  And I'll expect you for holidays in Paris; you know."  

Ginny hugged her hard.  "I can't _wait_ to visit you, and go _shopping!_"

Harry put his arms around her and held her tightly.  He looked up at Severus Snape.  "Please be good to her," he said.

Snape patted Harry and Ron's shoulders.  "Never fear, Potter, Weasley.  I shall."  Harry looked at him, astonished. The Professor was actually _smiling._

"Cor!" Ron gasped. "He _patted _us!"

"And he _smiled_ while he did it, too" Harry added.

Hagrid, tears of happiness coursing down into his beard, handed the couple into the open carriage.  Hermione turned around carefully, her back to the crowd.  She tossed her bouquet over her shoulder, and a hundred wands rose into the air to retrieve it.  The bouquet sailed among the forest of wands, circled twice, and dropped into the waiting hands of – *** 

Albus Dumbledore, surrounded by the rest of the Masters, made his way over to carriage, waving goodbye.  "Don't go yet!" he shouted.  Puzzled, Hermione looked at Severus, as surprised as she.   Then, a bald head with two floppy ears and enormous eyes appeared above the carriage-frame, and a little House Elf, wearing an immaculately-ironed pillowslip, climbed onto the carriage and settled itself next to the driver.  

_"Moi, je vous acompagne á Paris, Maitresse e__t__ Maitre,__" _said little Nibby.  He was carrying a small suitcase, a wicker cage containing a thoroughly unamused Crookshanks, and a little sack with his treasured piece of wedding-cake. 

"So our household begins," said Severus. 

The horses leaned into their harness, and the carriage began to move.  An awful clash and clatter informed the newlyweds that someone had tied a good number of old tin cans to the rear of the vehicle.  Hermione settled back into the circling arms of the happiest man she had ever seen in her life.  He rested his jaw against her forehead, and for the second time that day, he prayed:  _If I should die tomorrow –if all of this should turn out to be a dream, or if I should awaken in Azkaban, broken and hopeless – I will always be thankful for this moment of joy. Gods protect my wife, and grant me time to live with her in peace and happiness._

"Well, wife? Are you comfortable?  We shall be in Ayrshire shortly, and we can take off this finery."

Hermione looked up at him.  "Wife," she said, and smiled, snuggling against him.  "Yes, husband, I'm comfortable, but I'll be more so when I'm out of all this samite and in my old tweed skirt and stout shoes again.  We'll need the few days to pack and get ready."

"I had envisioned you robed as Nature made you," Severus said.  "I shall be delighted to lay this _skirt _aside and put on my favourite garment."

 "No!" she cried.  "Not that tatty grey nightshift!"

He looked down his nose at her.  "At my selection of underclothes again, eh?

 Hermione put her arms around his neck and whispered in his ear, _"It covers my favourite dish."_

The groom's smirk was up to his usual standard.  "Indeed, my love," he said, his voice black silk velvet, "I would not see you go, uh, _hungry."_ And his long hand slid down over her legs and under her gown.

The carriage clattered away down the road, the tin cans bumping along after it.

Arm in arm, Dame Angharad and Brigit walked into the Great Hall, to join the feast already in progress.  Brigit noticed Harry Potter leaning against a pillar, looking out sadly at the departing carriage.  She slipped her free hand through Harry's arm.  "Ye need not grieve," she said.  "Ye have not lost a friend; she will ever be part of your life." 

Harry looked at her with a melancholy smile.  "I hope so," he said.  "But she'll be his _wife_!"

"Whisht!" said Brigit, and knocked her knuckles on his head.  "Ye have a new kinsman, and if I am not mistaken, did ye not save each others' lives?  Ye owe him family loyalty.  He has learned much, and herself will keep him to rights."

Harry looked into her gold-flecked blue eyes.  A dimple appeared on each side of her smiling mouth.  He felt himself beginning to blush. _She has elven ears…_

"_Ah_," said Brigit.  "So _yourself _has much to learn, do ye?"  She turned to the Green Lady:  "A handsome lad, is he not?  I think he might be wantin' some _lessons_."  And she pulled Harry away towards the dancing-floor.

_Finis_

*** You will have to read "I Will Follow Thee" to find out who caught the bouquet.  Blessed be!

  Dame Niamh


End file.
